Michel Bauwens: Peer-to-Peer, the Commons, and the Next Civilization
Michel (00:00)
if you think about what the technology that is the internet brought to the world, it's something very specific that did not exist before, which is the capacity for translocal self-organization.
markets and States have not been able to do regeneration. It just haven't. And so we're going to need something else if we want to break through that barrier
which I call the third information barrier. If we want to break through that barrier, we're going to have to invent something new. It's not just doing the old stuff in a new way. And it's not the old debate between more state or more market. It's different. It's a different debate.
House Of Peregrine (00:37)
Yeah.
Yeah.
everyone and welcome to the House of Peregrine podcast. I'm Mickelle Weber, your host, and today's guest is one of those minds who help you zoom out and then somehow comes back down to earth with more clarity. Michel Bauwens is the founder of the P2P Foundation, an observatory and advocacy hub for all things peer-to-peer and commons-based. In other words, how humans organize, create, and care for what we share, especially in times when the old systems feel increasingly flimsy.
Michel is Belgian, a father of four, and he's been living in Chi-Mai, Thailand since 2003. He spent decades tracking a question that feels deeply relevant to life abroad and honestly to the world right now. What happens when the ways we've been taught to build society economically, socially, politically, stop matching the world we're actually living in? One of Michel's core ideas is something he calls Cosmo Local, this practical principle that says all things heavy are more local and all things light are global and shared.
So the stuff that requires resources, labor, land, logistics, keep that grounded, keep it local. But knowledge, design, code, shared learning, let that move freely. Let that be shared globally. It's a framework that feels especially resonant for us Peregrines, who are people living between the worlds, navigating belonging, systems, and identity across borders. In this conversation, we explore what Michel describes as civilizational transition, why the political narratives we've inherited are struggling to hold.
why our debates about technology and ecology keep getting stuck, and what a third path might look like. One that's rooted in commons, not as a utopia, as a lived human practice of mutual responsibility, shared value, and real world resilience. If you've ever felt the tension between wanting progress and needing limits, between global connection and local reality, or between the life you're building and the systems you're building it inside of, this episode is gonna give you language.
describe what you're going through. Michel, welcome to the podcast. Thank you so much for joining me. And that was a long intro, but I think well worth it.
Michel (03:21)
Thank you for having me. I'm looking forward to our conversation.
House Of Peregrine (03:25)
Me too. There's so much here that I'm excited to dive in. So first, just for our audience, you please just briefly introduce yourself and what you're up to.
Michel (03:34)
Well, I think you said most of it. So I moved from Belgium to Thailand in 2003, got married locally, got two new kids here. So I have four kids in all, the youngest is 21. And I've kind of left Belgium because I...
I couldn't get excited anymore about basically the commercial world. I was doing digital strategy for large telco, the largest in Belgium. Before that in the nineties, had done, a magazine, done a three hour documentary and launched two startups. And yeah, just the whole, you know, profit focus kind of.
didn't feel enough for me. so one way I like to put it is that, you know, I feel in my life, but also in general in society, that there should be a balance between extractive and regenerative. Right. So what you and I and the world needs from the world, know, food, shelter, there's no way around that. We need to do that.
But we also need to maintain our house so that it can last for ages, essentially. And I don't think we're doing that. So I don't think the current political system that we have, political economy, actually achieves that. So we are in this imbalance and it's accelerating. And so that kind of...
creates the need to look for, you is there another way to do this to achieve this balance between regeneration and extractivism? And yes, go ahead. No, no, go ahead.
House Of Peregrine (05:10)
Yeah. Would you, are you familiar with the, sorry, sorry to interrupt, but it just brought to mind
the idea. Are you familiar with the idea of positive ownership?
Michel (05:20)
I'm not sure exactly what you mean it with that, but you know, I follow like generative ownership Marjorie Kelly, for example, this is one of the people I follow and you know, she has a more or less precise definition of what it means to own something so that you grow it and maintain its resource base at the same time. So if that's what you mean, yeah. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah.
House Of Peregrine (05:31)
Yeah.
Yeah, that's what I came to me when you were saying because, that,
sorry to interrupt you. So what is the manifestation of that right now? And then I'll get into my question. Sorry, I'm a little excited.
Michel (05:56)
Well, I followed two notions since 2003. One is called peer-to-peer. And that's basically what we're doing here. basically, if you think about what the technology that is the internet brought to the world, it's something very specific that did not exist before, which is the capacity for translocal self-organization.
we were in a physical world, in a geographical world. some people would call it the geosphere, the world of matter, of our bodies. Then we have the biosphere, the sphere of life, which came after. But now we have the newosphere, the community of the mind. And it existed in terms of fast transportation and fast
communication, but it didn't exist in instantaneous. this is what we have now is many too many instantaneous permanent capacity to communicate and self-organize and create and distribute value. And that really means we have two layers now. The layer that existed that we're familiar with, like the layer of civilization essentially.
and then the layer of whatever we want to call what is coming. And the whole challenge for humanity is how do we bring those two levels together? Because you can also be very destructive if you're not rooted. ⁓ So we need to rethink the relationship. And that's why I talk really about post-civilization.
House Of Peregrine (07:10)
Yeah, and we, and.
Yeah, rooted and have values and have actual value guided.
Michel (07:25)
because I actually do think that civilization, which came after the tribe, so that you have the tribal world based on kinship, based on location. Then we have this larger complex world based on division of labor, armies, commerce, with markets and states. And this has been the case of 5,000 years in different iterations, but that remained the
basic organization of our world, town and country. know, getting a surplus from farming to get industry going, then get a surplus from industry going to get the cognitive going. And I think this is where we are.
House Of Peregrine (08:02)
And so you think we're going somewhere new. And I agree. just.
Michel (08:05)
Absolutely. And I, you know, in my more optimistic days, I call it post-civilization
because I actually think if it's no longer just based on the physical relation between town and country, it's going to be something different. And I actually, you know, just wrote an article about this. It's called Breaking the Third Information Barrier. Right. So, so humanity was doing gifting and commoning mostly.
House Of Peregrine (08:25)
Yeah, awesome.
Michel (08:30)
for thousands of years. you know, the state and the market were not existing or very marginal. Then we moved to this kind of permanent coexistence and competition between state and markets form, you either the nation or the corporation. But I think actually we're now going to something new, which is based on and let me just use the words first, you know, even if they're difficult for most people, stigmurgy.
and the comments. StigmaG means mutual signaling. So if you think, you know, how does free software happen? You know, like Linux that everybody's using, including the, you know, the biggest companies are using it now. It's based on mutual signaling. So you have an open ecosystem, an open digital ecosystem where everybody can see from their own point of view, what it is they could be doing.
House Of Peregrine (09:10)
I use Linux.
Michel (09:25)
They don't have to, but they can if they want to, if they have the right skills. And so, and then you decide whether to give or not give your contribution to that common entity. Right. So that's peer to peer signaling. And my claim is a very strong claim, of course, but I think we can already see it happening is that this is a partial replacement for markets and States. Not fully, but
already partially. know, if you just to make the advanced claim already, you know, you're probably familiar and some of your audience with DAO's distributed autonomous organizations. If you look at it, you know, if you look at what a DAO is, that's what it is. It's an incentive alignment institution. And it can do markets, it can sell and buy. It can make
House Of Peregrine (10:02)
Yeah. Yes, but thank you for defining it. Go ahead.
Michel (10:21)
you agreements with public authorities, make, you know, two contracts, and it can make contributions that nobody has asked for, but that are allowed in the system. So open permissionless contributions. And so it's already introduces stigmatgy, but it also already is a meta organization that can deal with markets and states while actually offering even more than what they can. Right.
And so I would argue, this was, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Something new as well. So it's, it's both adding and then transforming the whole mix. But I would argue that, you know, markets and States have not been able to do regeneration. It just haven't. And so we're going to need something else if we want to break through that barrier.
House Of Peregrine (10:51)
Or offer something, or I would say offer something they can't, which is not replacing, but offer,
Michel (11:19)
which I call the third information barrier. If we want to break through that barrier, we're going to have to invent something new. It's not just doing the old stuff in a new way. And it's not the old debate between more state or more market. It's different. It's a different debate.
House Of Peregrine (11:30)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Maybe it's more human or more global or more something, but we know something's emerging. And it occurs to me, at least this has been my own journey a little bit, is that
Value and values. What we've based value and values on has been pretty rooted in this idea that you're saying, which is like city, state. I call it a dominance model. It's been based on that and also value being very specific to what you can quantify. And so that
my audience knows that that's, yeah, that's a kamade.
Michel (12:12)
But it's a commodity, right? So the way I would put it is that,
I mean, the commodity has existed for a long time, but it really became completely dominant, would say, starting in the 16th, 18th century. That's when, because even before we were discussing whether value didn't come from land or from labor.
And then it's like, okay, it's about making commodities and selling them for profit. This is how the system works. Only that way.
House Of Peregrine (12:42)
Yep.
Yep. And I feel like that's being roundly rejected at the moment, I guess, is that's where the Dows, Dows emerged. What would you say? Like for me, they emerged maybe like eight years ago. They kind of started emerging, kind of hit a peak.
Michel (12:55)
Yeah, well, actually,
you probably don't know that, but the Bitcoin white paper was published on my website.
House Of Peregrine (13:01)
I didn't know that. Wow.
Michel (13:02)
Yeah, yeah. And
I'm the first and the last person to have talked with Satoshi outside of the cryptographic mailing list as well. So he, don't know who he is, you know, and it's just email and it's archived in Bitcoin magazines. But, you know, it seemed that he recognized something in my work because, you he was doing peer-to-peer tech and I was doing peer-to-peer social.
House Of Peregrine (13:20)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Michel (13:29)
And I think he must have recognized some kind of familiarity and that's why he decided to do it here. Now I did lose my thread. Maybe you can remind me what I was going to reply to.
House Of Peregrine (13:37)
sorry. Yeah, no, what I wanted to,
yeah, just what I wanted to bring to our listeners is this idea that what we currently have modeled our world on and connection and commerce was one way. And then I feel like for a while there, at least one part of technologists and culture, yeah, was going, went towards dows. And that kind of was a huge experiment with
Michel (13:55)
Right, yes, now I know what I wanted to say.
Well, here's the way I would put it, which actually is also an answer to your own earlier work about valuing women's work. So the work now, the value is now exclusively derived from the notion of a commodity, a product. So you need scarcity. You need scarce resources. You make something that's also scarce with it, a product.
House Of Peregrine (14:05)
It's still ongoing.
⁓ Yeah.
Michel (14:31)
It has a tension between supply and demand and that creates the price, the price gets profit. Profit allows for taxation and redistribution. But here's the thing. We need to extract first and then only then can we redistribute. And that's a problem because it's always behind the regeneration is always behind. So it's like there's a structural deficit in the way we look at value.
And I think what is happening already, this is not like a, you know, predictions for the future is that in this system that is emerging, that you can see in open source, in crypto, in DAOs, is that the value is already contributory. So I'll give you an example. You know, I'll take a free software like Linux, which, you know, is an operating system that can replace Microsoft if you want.
So it's where does it value come from? From all the people contributing to the code base, to the common code base. Some of them are paid by big companies. Some of them are independents. Some of them work for free. Like around 25 % of the people work for free because it's open so they can solve their own issues. And that's why they don't ask anybody permission to make it better. Right. So.
On top of that, now, if you have a freely copyable digital resource, I have bad news for you if you're a business person, because it's not scarce. There's no price. it's yeah, it's already outside of that scarcity paradigm. But in order to make it work in the world, you still need to do a lot of scarce work.
House Of Peregrine (16:04)
Yeah, and now there's AI.
Michel (16:20)
So, this is what the business model is entirely different. It's not buying a resource, hiring labor, making a product and selling it. Here it is, you know, participating in this common endeavor, seeing what needs to be done to make it workable in the real world. So you can, and then you're going to add value to it. And that added value is the market. But so
What you've done, and this is very important to understand that what you have done without realizing it is you inverted the logic already because the primary logic is contributory and the commodity logic is derivative from the contribution. So now you get a new logic, which is if I'm a company and I want to be successful, I cannot just merely exploit the commodity. I actually have to nurture.
the commons from which I am interdependent. Right. So this is already happening within the broad economy. And already in 2000 and a half, there were calculations that it was already one sixth of GDP in the US. So I'm just saying this because it's not something that's gonna happen. You know, it's already there. so and then maybe give you one more element to show you how crypto is different from open source.
House Of Peregrine (17:31)
Yeah, it's happening.
Michel (17:44)
The problem with the open source model was that if you were working for free, know, regeneratively on the common code base, nobody was paying you. That was a problem. And then, know, companies came in like IBM and they started subsidizing, which has its own issues. But in crypto, basically we find a way to pay for that common labor.
and I don't know if you're familiar with this. exactly, exactly. So basically, you know, first we tried it with these, what was it called? You know, the ICOs, the yeah, and so usually what was done then, it was made illegal and difficult, but what was done then was that 40 % of the money was actually reserved for labor. So I was automatically
House Of Peregrine (18:10)
in a way that buys food. Like that was the whole thing. You have to be able to buy a pizza.
Michel (18:37)
know, pay. And what they're doing now, it's a bit more complicated, but they're doing something called public funding. And so they're taxing themselves.
And then they're doing these public funding rounds which remunerates the common work. So that's in a way an improvement in some fundamental way over the open source model because now everybody in these circles gets paid. And you shouldn't underestimate that. So it's $5 trillion floating around in this economy already, pure...
crypto flows, you have 50 million digital nomads.
House Of Peregrine (19:14)
Mm-hmm.
Michel (19:15)
You know, and I'm not saying they're all doing crypto, but the sizable amount of these people are doing crypto and open source. And are part of this broader. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Some, you know, there's different reasons. and so this is a new world that's growing within the old, right? So it's, it's, it's not in utopia. There's issues, there's problems, but it's definitely there.
House Of Peregrine (19:22)
Yep, by necessity, some of them.
Michel (19:41)
And it's definitely in my view where it is going. Right.
House Of Peregrine (19:44)
Yeah,
and I think that people, what I have noticed is that it is in getting into the infrastructure of our world and changing the way things are done slowly without people really noticing. And so it's like a revolution that's happening for some people, awareness. But what I think, we both have kind of a...
inclination to do is to bring some of these values out into the real world, into the world where humans live. And crypto is one way, right? Like money, transfer of value, that's one way. But what if now that we have that, those values or those ideas, our idea of what things can be, what contribution is, what this sort of thing,
Michel (20:40)
So
House Of Peregrine (20:40)
What if that can evolve? Yeah.
Michel (20:40)
yeah, that's the whole point, right? So that's the whole point is how do you get from something that you already experiencing to a broader culture? And I think this is the kind of intermediary system where we're in. I will offer you a reading of current politics that actually, in a way, argues this is what is happening, right? So you're probably familiar with, what's his name?
House Of Peregrine (21:00)
Yeah, let's hear it.
Michel (21:03)
I forgot the name of the author, David Goodman, think. It's about the some-wheres and the no-wheres. And it's an explanation of why we have populism. So basically, you have people like us, more highly educated, we know how to work with computers, we can move around. So we were more or less okay with the globalization trends because we can manage.
A lot of other people don't experience the world that way because they have physical skills linked to certain types of machines that are located. they became basically more displaced and they are feeding. So you have to recognize we do have forces in our world who actually do want to bring back the nation state.
House Of Peregrine (21:31)
exciting for us not scary. Yeah.
Michel (21:53)
And this is, know, and, you know, we have to take that seriously. Like these people could win and become the dominant force and could change our world in a particular way. And in a way, I think you can see the current global geopolitics as a struggle between.
You know, the landlocked Chinese, Russian state centric, but still old form, actually old form, even, know, they have high tech, but they still see the world in, like, you know, from the point of view of these big nation states. And then we have the more trading, you know, business oriented, you know, American style. okay. I, what I propose to you is that there's a third force.
And that third force would be all those people who say, well, we don't really want to choose between those two. I think there's something else coming. And a way to look at it is, you know, if you had lived in the 14th century, maybe 16th century, OK, that period, because, you know, it's hard to pin down. But so here's what happened. Right. 90 % of the people in Europe were still living on the land with lords.
House Of Peregrine (22:59)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Michel (23:08)
as serfs or various, you these regimes. That was their world. At the same time, though, you had all these people in the cities, you know, where they were highly educated, you know, they were building something new, you know, all these city states, right? And so now imagine you're in Italy in the 16th century. You get the Spanish.
and the French army is invading. Why? Because they have dynasties already. They can operate at the nation scale. They have cannons and pikes and you cannot defend yourself. Right? So at that moment, I imagine that those people in this Italian city state started thinking we need something else. We need to move like them. We also need our own nations. So this is
I think what I asked you to do today, know, our listeners, is to imagine that, yeah, most of the people are still in this world where they think, you know, it's based on industry, working in factories and maybe in services.
House Of Peregrine (24:12)
even at startups. Yeah, yeah, it is something else, but the mentality is still that it's still physical at some level.
Michel (24:13)
Yeah, but there's already something else, right?
Yes, but
in my world, maybe more than yours, I'm not sure what kind of life you have, certainly, I'm not a nomad, actually. I'm an expat in a way. I'm more migrant. But my milieu is actually a lot of digital nomads. And I can tell you that for them, and there's many of them, their imagination has already moved on.
House Of Peregrine (24:24)
Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. I totally agree with that.
Michel (24:46)
You know, they're not waiting for
the Netherlands or Germany to get a new lease on life and become, no, no, no, no. They're thinking about, we, you know, can we join a network nation? Can we join a network state? So their imaginary is already post-national. And you'd be surprised. I've seen, know, surveys in countries that you wouldn't expect like Nigeria and Kenya, the young people.
House Of Peregrine (24:59)
Yes, yeah, absolutely.
Michel (25:15)
They don't believe in their own country. They already projecting themselves in this digital world. So this is where we are. We're not there yet, but we're also no longer in that old world. We're in what Gramsci calls the time of monsters, where the new is not fully born yet and the old is not fully dead yet. And so we're this kind of in-between period.
House Of Peregrine (25:20)
Yeah, and that's important. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, and I think what I meant by startups, just so we're clear, is the actual companies, not the people in them. And so the companies are still kind of based on that old model, even though they're building. Yes. Yeah.
Michel (25:48)
It's still a very extractive system. be honest, you know, I've
been in startups, I created two startups, right? And it doesn't make you a happy life. You know, one out of a hundred people is going to succeed. It's hyper-extractive. And if today I meet people like that, I feel sorry for them because they have no peace.
House Of Peregrine (25:53)
Yeah.
Michel (26:09)
they are always one step away from failure, hoping that they're going to make it. And I don't think this is a way to live, to be honest. I, know, I, the, the study system has lost its appeal to me. Yes, it's dynamic. Yes, it's energetic, but the human cost, I think. Yes.
House Of Peregrine (26:17)
Yeah.
It's still extractive of the human. always
say that it's built on the backs of young men who are feeling, mostly men still, young men who have a desperate need to survive. And the American startup system is different than the European startup system. It's like Hunger Games. But it's highly extractive.
Michel (26:34)
Yeah.
Yeah, Yeah, they high strung. They can just see it in their body language, you know, that they're
fighting for their lives.
House Of Peregrine (26:52)
But the extraction really is how many hours can you work? How much can you build? How much can you? And for me, that's very old thinking still, even though they're building technology, I guess is that. I just wanted, it's not just like old jobs, I feel, that are stuck in this mentality. It's also companies that are like, we expect 14 hours a day, seven days a week building at its hyper speed. And that's the only way to compete. And now with AI, that same...
Michel (27:07)
Yeah, yeah.
House Of Peregrine (27:20)
that same system is crumbling because now machines can build software faster than humans. And so we see it crumbling there too, I believe. And in a way, yeah. Yeah.
Michel (27:24)
Yes.
Yeah. Okay. Can I say like a general remark on this? You know, so
I think this is a useful way to see it. So on the one hand, we have extraction regimes, like new ways of extracting value. you know, hunter gathering was one agriculture and mining was another industry was another, now cognitive internet AI is, is, is, you know, is, putting itself in place, right? These systems.
House Of Peregrine (27:54)
Mm-hmm.
Michel (27:57)
are extremely costly for human beings. So once you invent agriculture, you are displacing hunter gathering tribes. They become marginal in the mountains and the marshes. Once you have industry, you're marginalizing the farmers. They become a minority in the population eventually. And now that we're doing both at the same time, this is going to be very costly for physical and non-physical working class people. So historically,
societies have reacted against that. So animism and shamanism, if you like, is the way to make the hunter-gathering lifestyle human for small tribes where everybody is kinship and loves each other. Then in civilization itself, it's religion, the world religions. So there's something called the actual religions.
House Of Peregrine (28:37)
you
Michel (28:50)
because in 1200 BC there was some kind of climate change and all the empires collapsed in the Mediterranean and the Middle East. And out of that came Buddhism, Christianity, Judaism, Greek philosophy, Taoism, Confucianism. So in a way, these world religions is a way to humanize.
what was breaking down before. And I would argue socialism in a very broad sense, anarchism, even liberalism, there were reactions to industrialism, like how can we humanize industrialism, right? And so then the question becomes, what is the reaction today to AI, to the internet? And so my argument is that...
It's constructive networks today. So it's not a return to religion. Although, you know, a lot of people are searching in that direction. It's also not, you know, new party that is going to change everything and take power. It's going to be networks of people that are cosmolocally organized around a common value proposition and actually decide this is how we want to live.
House Of Peregrine (29:44)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Michel (30:03)
And this is how we're going to do it together. So I think, you know, so you the extractive regime and the purification engine, you put them together, you can have a reading of an interesting reading of history. And we are, you know, already in this transformation towards a new extraction regime, you know, AI based, which is going to be very costly. But there's already also reaction to it, which is appropriating AI appropriating, you know, the networks.
House Of Peregrine (30:21)
Mm-hmm. Yep. Yep.
Michel (30:33)
for the co-construction of some of a life worth living.
House Of Peregrine (30:37)
Yep. And would you, so there's two things here that I would like to comment. This is, you've gotten to the heart of why I've built House of Peregrine, basically. And so I'd love to hear, well, tell you for a second about it, but also get your input on it. Living abroad, moving abroad is what opened my eyes to this lack of connective layer to international people. there's an internet, super important, there's local,
like you said, like passports and visas and all this stuff, which they don't match, but you still have to deal in both. But the connective layer or this, like the internet was too big, but there was nothing local, like meetup groups, those aren't nutritious enough in the way where you can, you know, work on projects together or you can trade goods or you can actually
harness this workforce that actually doesn't have a visa, that doesn't have maybe full-time work ability because living abroad, especially partnered, brings up a different time. And so I saw this, this lack of layer of connectivity and that is, and the ability to exchange value, whatever value is, money or time or resources or knowledge. And that is what
House of Peregrine is at its base is attempting to build that connectivity layer of people who are doing life together already. But they are, it is a different layer. So there's like the local people that have lived here, lived in that place forever. There's tourists, there's migrants. And then there's this people who are maybe both, right? People who have settled.
but they're migrants, but they want to exist at this larger level ⁓ of connectivity. And so that's what House of Peregrine is, and that's why we did it on the blockchain, because that was the most, wanna say.
Michel (32:27)
Thank you.
So the way I
interpret what you're doing is the following is that, you know, we used to be collectivists, you know, like, especially in tribal, you know, everybody around you is your, and then civilization is a trauma, right? Because once you have civilization, now you're living with people that you don't know, you have to go to, you know, to fight in an army with people that you don't know and following orders of people.
House Of Peregrine (32:50)
Mm-hmm.
Yep.
I always say there's a cult in every culture and you had, were indoctrinated into it.
Michel (33:01)
⁓ So basically,
civilization is an attempt through religion at first to create an identity beyond the tribe, to create unity beyond the tribe. And then the nation came, the Western invention is the nation-state, which
House Of Peregrine (33:12)
Mm-hmm.
Michel (33:20)
you know, tries to create some kind of cultural homogeneity first and then create the unity and that killed the empires basically. You World War I is we destroy the empires and replace it with the nation state system, which has become the global system. But it, you know, even though it's relatively successful for a while, it also came at a huge price of atomization, right? And I think that's what modernity eventually does to people is just
more more atomization. And in a way, what we're trying to do with peer-to-peer and what you're trying to do with Peregrine is healing that atomization and creating new forms of relational and belonging. Because we don't know how to do that. What we're getting from the system is not enough to be happy. ⁓
House Of Peregrine (34:11)
Yeah, and much like you're describing the volunteer
or the just giving your time and that also doesn't work.
Michel (34:16)
Yeah, so there's different ways and I think your ways
is very interesting because I realized that's a reality. I have the same in Chiang Mai, which is, you know, people in between. They're going to be here for several years and then they're going to maybe go to another place where they'll meet similar people. And so, you know,
House Of Peregrine (34:35)
So there is a shared
culture. That's the.
Michel (34:37)
Yeah,
and so, the way they did it, let me just maybe tell you that as an interesting aside, you know, so I was invited to the first pop-up village in Montenegro, which was the first time that people from the Ethereum community, know, one of these sub-tribes of crypto got together because they were actually lonely and had, you know, not enough place where they could talk and learn from each other.
House Of Peregrine (35:01)
Neat.
Michel (35:03)
It was so successful that it created an explosion of pop-up villages, including in October 25, I think, or 24, a federation of villages in Chiang Mai. There were like 12 different tribes, know, pop-ups coming together in a more unified identity since they have been in Buenos Aires and different places. So now the...
And the third step is something called Zulkash that are friends of mine in Turkey, and they want to create fixed oasis. So not just like moving around because you know, can't really, I mean, you these young people are idealistic and say, you know, let's, let's find roots and connect with the local population. No way. In a, in a month you can't do it. Right. So now you have people who are actually living there.
House Of Peregrine (35:37)
Yep.
Michel (35:55)
are, you know, are semi-nomadic themselves, but then invite people to come to their town and want to create, you know, like a caravanserai of oasis along the old Silk Road. Right. So you can see, you know, this, this whole effort is about actually creating relationship, culture, community, belonging. And, know, what I say,
House Of Peregrine (36:07)
Mm. Yep.
Yes.
Michel (36:19)
Because the last steps are not these network nation, network states. If you don't have sacrifice and solidarity, it's not real enough.
That's where you want to get and that's why we have the nation because in the end, your pension, your unemployment, it comes from your nation. people like us, lose it because we move around and that's the problem.
House Of Peregrine (36:39)
Yep, that's absolutely right. And a reality, and
that's why it is mostly young people who do it, and then when kids come or when, so I, yeah.
Michel (36:49)
And then unfortunately
though, what actually happens is they decide no longer to have any kids.
So that's, you know, and I think that is a problem, know, a civilization that no longer wants to reproduce itself, that is a problem.
House Of Peregrine (37:05)
That is a problem. we want, whether we feel overpopulation or not, it's still a problem. ⁓ And that I totally agree. And that's the, you know, that was my sense, right? Like you need to have, and so that's, think when I read your work on LinkedIn, I followed you for probably at least a year. When I, I feel such resonance and with my own work, with this Cosmo local, like you can't just have, like I've been part of DOWs, right? Like we saw what the space.
Michel (37:09)
Yeah. Yes.
House Of Peregrine (37:32)
what these communities in space do. Then we have all the crypto meetups, which are people from all over the world flying to meet each other because they're lonely, understandably. But it's still not resilient enough to feel like you're part of a culture because we do have real human needs. We have children sometimes, we have sicknesses, we have whatever. We live human lives, luckily. Thank goodness we live human lives. I'm so lucky to live a human life. But that's where this idea
for me, really connects to reality, the reality of living a more globalized world or a more globalized lifestyle, whether you're a migrant, whether you're an expat, whether you're a digital nomad. These, what you're describing in Turkey and these little places, physical places that are, they have to be connected. Yes, the internet is part of it, but they have to have a relationship.
Michel (38:24)
Yeah, yeah.
⁓
There's a human interweb that needs to co-exist with the notes.
House Of Peregrine (38:28)
Yes, yes. Yeah.
And that takes new values. And that's what the word keeps coming to me when you're talking about religion and then shamanism. And so what emerges from me, and I don't know if you're familiar with the work of like Mark Gaffney or... ⁓
Michel (38:48)
Yes, I am. I actually
worked with Sachstein for two years. I stopped doing it last December. I had a contract that ended.
House Of Peregrine (38:52)
You do? I was just with them last week. So that's why this.
well, I was just with
Zach and Mark last week. what a small world. But their idea comes to, I feel like, plays with your ideas really nicely. yeah.
Michel (39:04)
well, what a small world. ⁓
Yeah, of course. Yeah, yeah. It's
kind of, you know, in the same broad sphere.
House Of Peregrine (39:16)
Yeah. so that, so when you bring up that, that's what shined for me is like, it's time for new and we're already seeing new values, right? Like stateless, same, but different, right? Like we honor each other's differences. This is like the, it's been forever that people live with these values of difference being a strength instead of a weakness. That's the strength of the international community. But how do we make that, that the question, and this is where I think
your ideas come in is like these new paradigms around what, how we do that, but also why we do that. And that really is beautiful to me. So that.
Michel (39:52)
Yeah, and I, you know,
so what I'm trying to do, you know, with my modest means, of course, is to make that the question, like, like the, you know, in the end, the question is like, what kind of transition are we in? You know, and that's, that's the place where I'm putting myself is like, you know, we are in a civilizational transition. It's
House Of Peregrine (40:01)
Yeah. So say the question.
Michel (40:17)
And it's even more than that. You know, that's why I talk about at least 5,000 year shift because, you know, just different ways to calculate it. You know, so you could say writing alphabet print electronic, you know, then you have four. ⁓ but actually until electronic, there was still in the fast communication in the geographic, right? And so in that sense, this is
House Of Peregrine (40:32)
Hmm.
Michel (40:44)
as important as what happened in Mesopotamia 3000 years before Christ because this is where the civilizational model was established, evolved, but right now this is no longer it. This is going to be something different.
House Of Peregrine (40:49)
Yep. Yep.
Organically, right, organically.
Mm-hmm.
Yep. And that is that where you think the debates about technology and ecology get stuck is that people don't realize and they're resisting that or what?
Michel (41:15)
Yeah, well, think
so. You know, with civilization came class and inequality. To a degree that wasn't there at all, you know, with tribal. I mean, you have age, you have gender, but, you know, there's no class distinction. So that's civilization. You know, the fact that you have lords and serfs and slaves, you know.
House Of Peregrine (41:33)
Mm-hmm.
Michel (41:40)
all the empires are based on slavery, there's no hiding from it, right? And now it's, okay, now it's commodity labor, but basically if you don't work, you still starve. So it's still very much, I'm not helping you because you're my family, I'm paying you if you do something for me and otherwise you're in trouble. So this is what civilization is, it's in a way...
House Of Peregrine (41:42)
Yeah. Yeah.
Michel (42:01)
There's a harshness to it, right? There's an exploitation to it. ⁓ And so I think that goes with a certain view on technology and on nature, which I think today are questionable. So the kind of mastery over nature and technology as the tool to do that, right?
House Of Peregrine (42:05)
Yep. One that we don't like to look at.
Yep. Yep.
Michel (42:25)
So I
think that's civilizational. And I think if we want to go to post-civilizational, will have to rethink. there's an author I really like. He's an orthodox thinker from Russia from the 1920s, Nikolai Berdlyov. He's like a five-stage theory of technology. Let me just briefly give that to you. So the first is participation. You're in a tribal, you use tools, they're your tools, you master the tools.
House Of Peregrine (42:42)
Yeah, great.
Michel (42:51)
You know, you think they're animated by spiritual forces. then we get into mechanistic. Then it becomes a pure tool, know, like when you do farming. Then the machine, you already lose control. It's hard to say whether the machine or you are in charge. But once you get to digital, we lose control. We are now, we have become the instrument of the technology.
House Of Peregrine (43:04)
Mm-hmm.
Michel (43:16)
Right. And so, so in the short term, this is not a good place where we're going, you know, because these forces, they're, controlling us. You know, if, if you, if you're a gig worker, know, whether you work for Starbucks or, know, for Uber, you are not a master of your world. You, you know, it's the algorithm dictates what you do.
House Of Peregrine (43:28)
And if you're used to a dominator model, yeah.
Michel (43:46)
Right? So there's this, there's no person there anymore, you know, that you can blame like to be a slave owner, but it's the algorithm owns you. And, yeah, and I think this is, this is not the way to go. then Berdlyov says that precisely because, you know, it's so dehumanizing, that will create a liberation that will say, no, this is not what we want.
House Of Peregrine (44:10)
Hmm.
So dehumanization
leads to.
Michel (44:15)
to a revolt, a spiritual revolt and a remastery of the human over the technological. So that's his hope. Yeah.
House Of Peregrine (44:21)
Yeah, how it, yeah,
that's his hope. And that's my question. And this, keep saying it I just wanna hear your thoughts on it. Cause I know I'm injecting something that maybe, but my read on this type of thinking of re-asserting dominance is part of why it's so scary is because we only know a dominator model. Dao's are obviously not a dominator model. Like we've gone through the other like completely collective.
communism, like there was still an overlord in some ways of the state. But that, I wonder, I guess this is the question, is if we need to start looking at that dominator impulse that we're building into all of our systems, right? Because we think it's the only way. And that's what we're scared of. We don't want to be dominated. Yeah.
Michel (45:02)
Yeah. Well, yeah, I'm, mixed. I have mixed feelings about this because, know, I've,
I'm 68. I've, you know, I've gone through my own idealistic phase in my life and, know, it didn't work. Um, so I'm, you know, I'm, I don't know. Like, I don't want to answer that question. Like, you know, is it possible? Right. Um, and so.
House Of Peregrine (45:25)
Yeah, I understand Yeah.
Michel (45:29)
I've come to a more moderate position, which is good enough to survive. And my claim is right now it's not even good enough to survive. We don't have the balance that we need. there is a Singaporean futurist who calls it a type one civilization. A type one civilization is a civilization that is in balance between the regenerative and the extractive.
House Of Peregrine (45:34)
Mm.
Interesting. Yeah. No, can't do it. Yeah. Yeah.
Michel (45:55)
We're not there yet. We can't do it. We are overshooting. ⁓
Now, I want to say this a bit provocatively. You you think about China. I've done a five week trip to China. Of course, not enough. you know that today in China, they're still polluting, but they're making an enormous progress in the other direction. Like amazing.
House Of Peregrine (46:16)
⁓ So they're balancing it.
Michel (46:18)
And if you are a member of the Communist Party of China, you are not judged on two criteria. One is called common prosperity, which includes GDP and poverty reduction. But the other one is ecological civilization. So in other words, you can't make a career anymore if you don't attend. the results are spectacular because Beijing was 500 ppm. It's clean.
House Of Peregrine (46:31)
Mm.
Michel (46:41)
blue skies, there's a forest around the city, there's no more oil-based motorcycles. So in a way, you know, I'm not saying they're there yet. They're not. Yes. Yes.
House Of Peregrine (46:42)
Wow.
Yeah, but what they've done is taken the value and really they've used current
models to do a really good job of this balance between. it's a retrofit, it's a retrofit, which is great. Yeah.
Michel (46:59)
Yeah, exactly. They've thought about it, they've made some decisions and they're doing it. ⁓ Yeah, and it's not enough, but at least you can
see there is something going on. ⁓ Right, and of course, the current political forces in the US, they go in the other direction. They're going back to the petrol.
House Of Peregrine (47:11)
Yeah, and that was a change of paradigm, right?
Yeah, it's a reaction.
Michel (47:26)
I fear for the West right now. It doesn't look good.
House Of Peregrine (47:30)
Yeah, me too. Me too. But I want to go back.
I'm going to ask you one provocative question, or at least go back to it, because I totally agree with you. Obviously, my thinking is working within the current system, making progress. But the leap is what I'm... The void in the leap and where we're going is where I'm spending a of my creative time.
And my provocation that I will, I've said to several people, but I want to see what you think is there. And I think that, Mark and Zach or whoever's writing that book is talking about it as the second shock of humanity of this AI, but, my take, my feel, and I'm a very privileged white American person totally own that. But I, my provocation about this.
Michel (48:13)
Right. Yeah.
House Of Peregrine (48:26)
really important danger that we see, that we talk about with AI and like this change, is my insight is that women have already been through the second shock in a lot of ways because they've been part of this dominator system. And again, it's there whether we want to or not, whether we have equality, whether we can vote, it's still there, right? Like we don't like to talk about it economically, it's there physically, what men are big and stronger. And so,
Unidealistically, actually realistically, I love to reimagine what generative looks like within difference and so, and how to value things equally without things being equal. And that's my imagination of the next step.
Michel (49:05)
Well, do you know Mary Harrington?
Okay, she's kind of a...
She calls herself the reactionary feminist, bear with me what that means because it is interesting. So she gives a kind of a history where before capitalism, families were working as a unit in the same space. So once you have industrialization, what happens first is that the men leave.
House Of Peregrine (49:16)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Michel (49:33)
And so they're no longer under control. So they start drinking, they go to the prostitutes. And the first feminist movement is actually a kind of moralizing movement to bring the men back under the control of the family. And so that they don't spend their money at the end of the month. And they give the money to their wives and then they get it back later. So this happened in like the first wave of industrialization.
The second wave was the bourgeois wave, which is basically getting equal rights. Why can't I have a bank account? Why can't I inherit the same amounts when my father dies? Those kinds of questions. So legal equality. The third one she calls biofeminism. And this is the one I grew up with. It's anything a man can do, a woman should be able to do. So let's eliminate all the things.
House Of Peregrine (50:23)
Yeah.
Michel (50:24)
That includes
abortion and contraception. if we want to work, we have to be able to work. We have to control our physical bodies so that's not something that stops us from doing it. But here's her critique. And I realize this is a provocative one, but she says, this comes from a period of abundance.
House Of Peregrine (50:40)
No, I love it.
and
Michel (50:46)
And
we are leaving, as we are leaving that period of abundance, because we are in overshoot, we are going to have a, we are going to need a new partnership based feminism. And, you know, I believe in this, so I'm on that side. I think this is what needs to be done because as much as there are problems, you know, associated with male dominance, there's also associates, you know, associated with female dominance.
House Of Peregrine (50:58)
Yep. And I would say this is super important with, yeah, yeah.
dominance.
Absolutely.
Michel (51:15)
which already
exists in many different fields. So it's a question of balance. And how do we get there?
House Of Peregrine (51:18)
Yeah, totally. Yeah.
And I see this same exact model playing out with passport strength. So that same idea that everyone's the same is I feel like what Donald Trump is operating on. Like every country can defend themselves. It's like, no, they can't. There's difference. There's a dominance that is there that you are blowing past and not appreciating.
Michel (51:35)
Right. Yes.
House Of Peregrine (51:42)
and strength and nuclear power and all this stuff. So when we assume we're equal and the same, I see this, the same thing with men and women. can, I see it exploding into again, passport strength, like, or like land, like some people are more economically viable here or their land is disappearing into the ocean. Like.
that play of, again, recognizing the dominator model and either recognizing it, being okay with it and using it, or again, what she's talking about, which is make it generative somehow with these differences, that denial of that already being there, I feel like is coming into focus with this AI craze, everyone being scared about it.
Michel (52:14)
Yeah.
Of course, yeah.
House Of Peregrine (52:25)
which in my opinion is somewhat healthy because it's really bringing out this whole, our creations are now based on dominator models and that scares us appropriately. Right, because now, like you said, machines are the dominators.
Michel (52:35)
Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well,
in the peer-to-peer movement, the way that we talk about this, it's called equipotentiality, right? So in a way, remember in beginning, we talked about changing of these coordination systems and value systems, right? So essentially what we're trying to do is...
House Of Peregrine (52:59)
Mm-hmm.
Michel (53:00)
recreating a global open ecosystem of tasks. The whole world can see what needs to be done in every aspect. It's just there for everybody to see.
House Of Peregrine (53:04)
Mm. Mm.
Mm-hmm.
Michel (53:16)
and then it frees us to...
contribute or not what is needed in that particular context. ⁓ And then the way we change the hierarchy is we change it from command hierarchies to control hierarchies. So today, if you look at a maintainer or an editor, they don't tell you what to do, but they can say no. They protect the integrity of the ecosystem. Still have power because they can say no.
House Of Peregrine (53:22)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Perfect. Yep.
Yep.
Michel (53:44)
But they
cannot say no to you doing it. They just don't accept your patch because it's not good enough. And things can go wrong, of course, in that context as well. And so this comes with a new vision of equality that we call equal potentiality. So the thing is, we're not going to...
House Of Peregrine (53:59)
Mm-hmm.
Michel (54:05)
rank you on any general standard. Like we're not going to say you're a better worker or no. The only thing of interest is whether you contribution fits that particular context. Yes or no. Right. So the human is, is, is started to be seen as.
House Of Peregrine (54:21)
Mmm.
Michel (54:28)
better and worse in a wide variety of skills and endeavors. And that doesn't actually change your value as a person. I think this is good. I think this is a better way than, because this is what we've been doing with basic jobs is always comparing people. You have better exams, you have better this. ⁓
House Of Peregrine (54:33)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
It's based on performance.
Michel (54:52)
But it's not,
and this is where identity politics goes completely wrong. Because if you think about it, meritocracy was egalitarian. This is what people forget. People got jobs because where they were born, the sons of the lords became lords. mean, meritocracy was against that. It was like, no, everybody has a chance to do the exams and we'll take the best.
And then the difference between the socialists and the liberals was, on that side I would have been a socialist, which is, well, you can say that we are equal, but we're not because we don't have education, we die early. So we need to create the conditions so that we can compete for that merit. Right.
And then what identity politics has done is no, no, no meritocracy is bad. Let's just give it, you know, because you're a female or you're black or you're, you know, and so we start giving people just based on their external, which I think is a, is a big regression, but in peer to peer, that's not what it does. Right. It looks at like very specifically. Yeah, go ahead.
House Of Peregrine (55:55)
Well, here's my, yeah.
And that's my question. why, and thank you for letting me ask questions, by the way. I'm not, I love asking questions. that's, so in your, when you said the PTP system divides up worldwide tasks, those are tasks that are, it's not like you're putting like childcare and making dinner on there, right? Like it's not worldwide tasks. It's tasks for a specific ecosystem, right?
Michel (56:21)
⁓ Contextually based, right, yeah.
House Of Peregrine (56:21)
with people with certain skill set.
Yeah, okay. And so that right there is my, it already has a bias, which is fine. Biases are fine. But with identity politics, that for me is trying to balance the context. And that is maybe a regression in some ways, but also a rec...
recognition that you can't actually operate in the context the same way. so trying to balance for the context, because the context hasn't changed yet, right? The context being whatever it is, ability to work, racism, sexism, or even just, you know, I don't know, skill, who knows, access to education. And so that I think is an argument to have more micro
systems instead of one big system, which I think is what Cosmo Local, yeah, yeah, yeah. And that really resonates. Yeah, yeah.
Michel (57:15)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that's ideally what we get in this, in a peer-to-peer system is, yeah. So can I say something about scale? you
know, so when I talk about Cosmo Local, it's not just everything is, you know, cosmic, right? Because some people would say, I'm working on a computer, I'm being Cosmo Local because of course I my body here and, know, so.
House Of Peregrine (57:34)
Mm-hmm.
Michel (57:41)
It's really about three things. One is relocalization. So we believe that the current neoliberal globalized supply system is not compatible with the long-term balance between our use of the planet and the resources. So that's one. So relocalization in a way, it's an ecological claim. It's that we need to re...
House Of Peregrine (57:45)
Uh-huh.
Michel (58:08)
reproduce a lot more things closer to the place of need than we have used to. Because two thirds of matter and energy is actually spent on transport today. So by doing this systematically, we can really reduce our human weight on the planet. So hyperlocalization also means autonomy. It's like...
House Of Peregrine (58:14)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Michel (58:31)
you know, where do we get our food from, where do we get our renewable energy from. So there's a lot of things we can actually get locally. Maybe not everything, because who knows, you know, the solar panel might still come from China. But it's a way of thinking, right? And thinking of subsidiarity of material production. Where can we sensibly do it more local so that we are lighter on the world? The second is bioregionalism. That's a very important scale.
House Of Peregrine (58:39)
Yeah.
Michel (58:59)
which is the scale of complementarities of regenerative work. I'm doing permaculture, you're doing renewable energy, you're doing sustainable housing, you're doing bio circular transport vehicles, et cetera, et cetera. And so this is ecologically centric, right? Then this is more maybe controversial for some people, but I think that the national level still has
House Of Peregrine (59:04)
Mm-hmm.
Michel (59:25)
a pertinence because it's history, it's culture, it's politics, it's how people constituted themselves as communities. So I don't think it will disappear, but I think that the nation state can be a vehicle for facilitating bio-region.
House Of Peregrine (59:41)
Totally, I agree with you.
Michel (59:43)
And then the fourth level is the cosmolocal, right? So the way I see it is you have bioregional guilds and those are people, you know, complimentary things at the bioregional level, but then you have cosmolocal guilds and all the people doing the same thing globally learning from each other. Right? So if you do permaculture, you're connected to all permaculturists.
House Of Peregrine (1:00:01)
Yep. Yep.
Mm-hmm.
Michel (1:00:07)
And you're
in real time what other people in other similar circumstances have learned. So this is for me, it's a world order. It's a way of conceiving a new civilization that is already there.
House Of Peregrine (1:00:20)
Yep.
Yeah,
and you've just described House of Peregrine. You've just described it. That's what we're building. And that synergy between a worldwide network of exchange of ideas, but also, mean, that's exactly, that is the reason I resonate so strongly with your work is because that is the connection to House of Peregrine because
Michel (1:00:27)
Alright. Yeah.
House Of Peregrine (1:00:46)
That is the layer we are building. I love that, for me at least, that was my journey through crypto and seeing how extracting and trying to replace the nation state and all this stuff. It's like, yeah, cool. That is super important.
Michel (1:01:02)
It didn't
have the relational values, right? They were dreaming of trustlessness and everything done to these anonymous and that's not, the human is not working that way. It didn't work.
House Of Peregrine (1:01:06)
Exactly, exactly.
Yes!
Absolutely. Yep.
Luckily, luckily humans
don't work that way. And of course you do need some trust, trustless, and we do need to think through that, but that's not the ideal. That's not reality. And anyone who isn't living on a computer, like I'm married to a tech guy, I love him, but like Uber is not the ultimate, you know what I mean? Like that is a cool invention, but it's not made for families. It's not made for, you know, and now it's more global than it was when it started, but.
But these companies that are being, and I would include crypto in this, these inventions are not always, they aren't based on humanity. They're based on a human who is not very connected to the world.
Michel (1:01:57)
Yeah, you know, I don't know if you will agree with this. It's a bit controversial. I get this from a guy called P.F. Jung, which I like as an integral thinker. And he says, you know, the big problems today is autism and schizoid.
House Of Peregrine (1:02:01)
No, but please do.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, and I've heard his work and I don't agree with
him using the word autism. So I just want to put that in because this is my podcast because autism has been disproved from actually being devoid of empathy. ⁓ That's like scientifically, they don't lack empathy. And so I would say lack of empathy and schizophrenia. I'm okay with saying. Yeah.
Michel (1:02:29)
Right.
Okay, it's fine. Yes. So,
but the idea, right, that some people are totally focused on some logical coherence at the expense of everything else. And that's, you know, exaggerated. And then other people just follow their gut, you know, like Trump in a way, right. And for their feeling and don't see anything else. And these are like two extremes that are there and that are, you know, we have to watch out for. ⁓
House Of Peregrine (1:02:45)
Yep. Yep.
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Yeah, and also, like you said,
relationality, the connection between humans has not been considered. It's been exploited, but it hasn't.
Michel (1:03:07)
Yeah. But you know, I would still
agree. And maybe, you know, maybe that's a prejudice, but that a lot of people that I meet in the software developing world, you know, do have more of this kind of like tendency to be disembodied, you know. ⁓ and that is, that is a problem because they're designing our stuff, you know.
House Of Peregrine (1:03:23)
Yep. Yeah. Early.
Totally
agree. Yep. And that, I had this huge discussion with my partner early on about what the word technology and progress means. And technology could only be used for certain things. And I was like, wait a minute, there's relational technology. There's all these technologies that are there, spiritual technologies even that we can download. And he just, for a lot of years we had this debate and he's obviously a tech.
Michel (1:03:38)
Uh-huh.
Yeah, of course.
House Of Peregrine (1:03:58)
very technical person. And progress, what is progress? Is it making something new and shinier? And what is progress? Because progress for me looks different than progress for you. And it's not always the next biggest thing, you know, in one straight line, right? And so I feel like that is, and we don't have humanity, and this is again, Mark Gaffney's work, humanity is not at the center, technology is at the center.
Michel (1:04:11)
Yeah, yeah. Yeah.
Yes.
House Of Peregrine (1:04:26)
And those three things is what I totally agree. And technology for technology's sake. And honestly, I think that's why we see AI coming out the way it is, is with those misconceptions coming. And that's what scares us, right? We don't want those people in charge, those things in charge. Yeah.
Michel (1:04:40)
Maybe it's because I'm getting older, but
I don't feel really honestly that any technology that we're doing now is actually bringing much to the table that we didn't have before. think this is not what it's about. It's not about, as much as I appreciate it as an intellectual to be able to search the whole...
House Of Peregrine (1:05:01)
Yeah.
Michel (1:05:02)
So let me give you my thoughts about AI and I'm really sorry, we need to wrap it up. But so I see AI for two things. One is universal synthesizing machine. Right. So we had not enough information. then we invented internet, then we have too much information and we can no longer absorb our own production. And this is what AI solves.
House Of Peregrine (1:05:06)
You gotta go, I know, yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Michel (1:05:26)
It's a permanent synthesizing machine and I'm very appreciative of what it does. As a researcher, I can really make much faster progress if I use it and if I don't use it, it has dangers, but overall it's useful. And then the second use for me is this kind of a trinity between the human, the more than human in terms of nature, the web of life and the artificial.
House Of Peregrine (1:05:48)
Mm-hmm.
Michel (1:05:51)
I do think that if we want to live in balance, overall with nature, as a complex society, that we do actually need the AI as an interface as well with nature. so I don't know if know Austin Wade-Smith, I recommend you talk to him. He talks about ecological institutions and it's how to make the non-human visible to the human is the central question of our era. I really like that.
House Of Peregrine (1:05:55)
Mm-hmm.
I love that too.
Michel (1:06:19)
like
the bees and the earthworms, we need them. But how do we know their needs? It will require all kinds of tools as well to make their worldview visible to us. So that's kind of my relative conclusion of our conversation is that the next civilization needs to have these three things in balance.
House Of Peregrine (1:06:42)
Yep, I totally, I could not agree more, could not find a better place for us to land our conversation that went all over the place. So thank you for following that. And I think highly relevant to international life and some of the things we all grapple with. And I know you have done this for many years as well. So thank you for bringing all of that fun. I hope our audience was able to follow along.
Where can people find out more about your writing and your work and what you're currently...
Michel (1:07:12)
So first
of all, I have a wiki, wiki.p2pfoundation.net, which has 40,000 articles. So it's, I monitor and curate what's happening in that field since 2005. So it's a record of civilizational transition in every field, business, spirituality, transportation, you name it, we have it.
House Of Peregrine (1:07:21)
Wow, okay.
Well, okay.
Michel (1:07:37)
The second thing is I write regularly for Substack and that's fourthcivilization.substack.com. So with those two, and I'm on X, MBauwens M-B-A-U-W-E-N-S as well.
House Of Peregrine (1:07:52)
Okay, we'll link those below and I know you gotta run so I'm gonna let you go but thank you for spending the time and I hope we get to have another conversation soon.
Michel (1:07:56)
Yes.
It was great to talk to you. Very stimulating. Thank you so much.
House Of Peregrine (1:08:03)
Yeah, you too. And thanks everyone for listening and I'll see you next time.