Erik Bordeleau - Cosmo-Financial Horizons: On Risk, Trust, Metastability and the Design of Post-Capitalist Economies

Let me first give you a brief introduction on the project we are working on. Two months ago, we conducted a design studio in Naples that culminated in a workshop titled SII: Sensing, Imaging, Intuiting. It was inspired by Simondon's recently translated work Imagination and Invention (2022). We explored how novelty can emerge through imaginative processes and speculative design practices drawing on his 'imagistic loop' which interrelates motor, perceptual, symbolic, and inventive images. Given your work on speculative pragmatism, I'd be interested to hear more about your research in this area.

I indeed often describe myself as a speculative pragmatist, following the work of Brian Massumi (he was my PhD supervisor at Université de Montréal) and Isabelle Stengers (I did my post-doc with her at Université libre de Bruxelles), but also people like Donna Haraway, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, and others. I guess if I had to contrast this current of thought from the perhaps more well-known speculative realism, I'd say: the pragmatist component is about the 'belief in the world', or, how to make a possible exist in the present. Speculative pragmatism calls for an art and an ethics of situated consequences.

When you say 'making a possible exist in the present,' I understand something collective rather than personal. Some possibilities feel learnable because we inherit a shared sense of them, through culture, stories, institutions, even rituals. In your framework, how does this inherited sense of the possible enter evaluation processes?

In the context of my recent exploration in the field of blockchain-based finance and alternative theories of value, I realize that I'm very much attracted by what I call ‘value discovery process’. Values are oftentimes virtual, they're not just out there, so the very manners by which we discover them relationally matter. The process itself matters as much as the outcome. When I speak of 'value discovery,' I'm deliberately reframing the economist's familiar notion of 'price discovery’, i.e. the mechanism by which markets arrive at and communicate prices. 

I guess this is a way of concretizing the question of the possible, not as a personal experience, but as a collective one. Markets aggregate all sorts of information that ends up in the legible result of a price. This process can be interpreted in terms of general equivalence, a flattening of the plurality of value expressions. So when discussing value discovery processes, it's always in plural, because these processes express a variety of different, heterogeneous worlds.

It's in this context that I like to talk about the 'cosmo-financial': it names the attempt to affirm the many worlds of value before they are leveled out by market operations: to preserve their relational opacities, their incommensurable claims, their distinct modes of mattering. I'm interested in these virtual spaces of encounter between worlds, and how they could result in different games of claims, in different expressions of value that resist the great capitalist flattening. This is the hope that was ignited after discovering Ethereum and the crypto-world: other ways of collectively encrypting and exchanging value, under more acceptable, more desirable terms.

You raise the point that the value of money is sustained by collective belief and I'm wondering about the mechanism of belief. What exactly stabilizes that belief to become operative when different worlds meet? Is it narrative, institution, habit, contract, that conserves, or keeps the valuation?

That's a great question, and I think as architects you probably have better answers than I do. You get to work with more concrete material and assemblages of forces, builders, etc. I guess I could say one of the things that strikes me while I learnt to approach money as a medium is how it acts as a kind of minimalist yet determining mediation for collective, historical memory. Wealth from the past is translated into different forms; it is accumulated through different financial vehicles, like time-traveling vessels that try to resist the erosion of time (i.e., devaluation). And on the other end, the accumulated capital only exists in relation to speculative futures. Capital acts as some kind of reserve of potentiality. Some Deleuzian readers (I'm reminded of Steven Shaviro) even like to suggest it's the ultimate body without organs.

Right, because if you think about it, I'm thinking specifically about David Graeber, speaking about how the... The book Debt: The First 5000 Years, where debt comes before actual money, and it's about the promise that you make to someone, right? I think capital works in a similar way. If you think about how capital is generated, particularly now in fiat systems, where the Reserve Bank prints money ad infinitum, but it's actually in the lending practices that more wealth is created, right? So, they give money to the bank, and you go to the local bank, and you borrow money, at a ratio of one to 10. In fractional reserve banking, they only have to keep a tenth of the value, and you're creating that promise of creating that value. So, they're enabling the construction of this value in whatever way. I mean...

Absolutely.

But that makes me want to circle back to you talking about value discovery... Isn't it more apt to say value creation?

Perhaps we could rephrase the question of value creation as how and what generates a certain type of futurity? Or in other words, I think value creation always involves a certain amount of speculation. We can understand speculation in many ways. One is the capacity to claim, the capacity to project. It's the meta-capacity to aspire and to make claims that are collectively readable and articulable, as Arjun Appadurai said somewhere (I think in 'The Future as Cultural Fact'). This is a fairly rare thing. So that's one thing, and then you say value creation rather than value discovery. I mean, it's kind of like the chicken and the egg problem... Ideas need to find their milieus, to individuate in the world, I guess...? Every milieu, every world creates its own values. There's a moment where these worlds meet other worlds. That's where the outward discovery process happens, and the values are translated in different ways.

What about the temporalities of this value creation and value discovery? Value creation, value discovery, growth. Because an important aspect for me is how you evaluate time in that equation, how you evaluate the future, and what is the time frame in which you operate and in which this value creation and discovery happens?

Can we discuss an example? What type of setting do you have in mind—speculative histories, an architecture project, some societal transformation?

This question comes from an environmental perspective. So, in terms of how we evaluate future conditions and how to operate the extraction of values.

Perhaps the future cannot be evaluated; rather, we can only anticipate forms of potentiality. Forms as fields of real, yet not-yet-actualized, possibilities that unfold. But how do we distinguish evaluating the future from setting conditions for a future to become imaginable, especially in ecological timeframes?

I mean, I'm not sure, isn't there how you evaluate present conditions that we have in specific economic relations? How do you evaluate future conditions?

Let me try to address the question of evaluation from a financial perspective, i.e., through the category of risk. The whole idea of finance is inherent to the colonial enterprise. You sail around the world, steal, pillage, take something from somewhere and bring it back to the 'metropole'. It's a risky adventure. The evaluation or the anticipation of risk is very time-bound and mobilizes all sorts of considerations. And little by little, as knowledge around the enterprise is elaborated, there is a pricing of the risk. Risk is a key modern category and has much to do with time. It's interesting to discuss futurial evaluation and the question of risk in the very country that invented the joint venture, which is a specific form of collective risk taking!¹

At some point, when I opened the Pandora's box of finance with a Deleuzian eye for the virtual, I started to appreciate differently the discrete charm of the financial categories by which capitalism became so operative. At the end of the day, it's about risking and speculating together. Capitalism doesn't have the monopoly on risking and speculating together. Communists, anarchists, we all risk and speculate together under different conditions. Risk, in its more classic, capitalist sense so to speak, allows you to price actions in an indeterminate future, and to transform all the unfathomable and radical uncertainty out there into something partly knowable—that transformation is called risk management. Risk management is fundamentally about reducing risk. Calibrating it. So, societies of today manage risk; they reduce risks. They price risk in an effort to make it manageable.

What I'm advocating for with the foregrounding of value discovery processes is that we learn to risk and speculate together with all the care and concreteness of professional risk managers, but toward a radically different end. Not the reduction of risk into manageable quantities, but the cultivation of what, after Simondon, I would call shared metastability: a shared condition of productive tension, of potentials held in suspension, ready to individuate into new forms. We need to develop new protocols for risking and speculating together in a post-capitalist fashion, at scale.

Shared metastability reverts the conceptualization around risk. For the last few years, with the Sphere, I've been working with circus artists. They say something really interesting about the relation between trust and risk. They insist that the circus is fundamentally about trust-building rather than risk-taking. Something like precursive trust, as William James puts it. What appears risky from the outside is, from inside, a practice of cultivating the conditions of generative trust.  I would like to think this applies to our attempt at defining post-capitalist collective endeavors. This type of concrete belief in the world would also involve some form of ROI, or return on investment that would resist and transform our current understanding of profit. I think the way we characterize surplus-value is really key here.

And I suppose taking a risk inherently involves a belief that the anticipated return justifies the exposure. Would you say, then, that this process is fundamentally qualitative?

Qualitative for sure, but it also needs to somehow be quantitatively measurable as well if we want to act at scale. Gabriel Tarde has a lot to say about this threshold of social 'quantification'. Opposing the quantitative to the qualitative is ultimately a beautiful soul's dead-end, in my view. I like to get reminded of this (slightly perverse, I have to admit) quote allegedly from Stalin: 'Quantity has a quality all of its own.' (haha!)

I would like to kind of pick up on the risk aspect and to bring it back to values and not just value discovery, to tie it back to what Myrto was saying about the environmental questions. It becomes a bit like an actuarial question, because I think what capitalism did well was to socialize risk.

As in, allowing people to have shares in a project, for instance?

Exactly, so you can have a small percentage of risk, but that also requires some sort of inclusivity. And that, I think, then becomes an ethical question. How do we include more people in participating in risk or building trust together?

At the financial level, the extension of the domain of inclusivity plays out in strange ways. I'm reminded of a somehow paradoxical case, that of indigenous people in Canada. For a long time, they weren't allowed to contract a loan with the bank, because they were not 'full citizens'...

Because of the paternalistic system, right?!

Yes, exactly. Back then, only if you were deemed a full-fledged citizen could you make a claim on the future, get a loan for it, and build your business. Indigenous people were considered second-class citizens in that sense, so they couldn't. Fast forward 120 years later and contracting a loan is not a privilege anymore; it's the way that the system functions to keep on extracting rent from people. I mean, it's crazy to think about it in these terms. So, for me, it's less about personal risk. It's less about personal debt. It's more about the type of indebtedness that we're able to contract together as a collective to activate more desirable futures.

But to bring these considerations closer to home: I think one of the things that need to change, for environmental action purposes, is the way we conceive of critique, especially in academia. What would be a form of critique that is concerned with fostering an ethos of shared metastability rather than critical purity? Maybe we don't know how to price the future that we aspire to, but we know that this is the future that we need to work for, it's not fully priced in yet, and yet we go for it. Traditional critique is just not doing it anymore, because it's taken for granted, and the institutions that allow for it to happen have been largely defanged.

On a slightly different note: critique is fundamental to creating value. The performance and financial theorist Randy Martin has a lot of things to say about the entanglement of criticality and value, but I won't go there now.

How do educational institutions shape our collective capacity to manage and distribute risk? Do they operate as planes of consistency, stabilizing shared values and providing a framework for collective becoming? While they seem to offer a structured path, do they truly reduce risk, or do they simply reframe it in ways that support longer-term investment in potential futures?

I like your focus on how to foster conditions for long-term investment in potential futures. I think that's one of the key reasons why we have institutions, and educational institutions in the first place. And there is a collective desire that's invested in each student, and a risk passing through an institution is a mitigated risk, so to speak. I was mentioning William James's idea of precursive trust before. I think it's worth quoting in full because it describes how, at a very abstract level but yet very relatable existentially, we engage collectively in building futures we can 'invest' in:

‘We can and we may, as it were, jump with both feet off the ground into or towards a world of which we trust the other parts to meet our jump—and only so can the making of a perfected world of pluralistic pattern ever take place. Only through our precursive trust in it can it come into being.’

But what happens when the conditions of trust break down, or rather, if they break?

If it breaks, yes... your remark makes me think of rampant resentment towering over our democratic institutions these days, the rise of the extreme-right fueled by a sense of betrayal and hopelessness, etc. I don't think I need to explain any of this further.

I'm not sure how to respond to this question. Maybe I can share with you a moment where I felt the poisonous bite of resentment, in a way that truly affected my capacity to project into the future. It's just a little personal anecdote, but maybe it can resonate. Not so long ago, I became very precarious. I did all that was expected from me, but I couldn't land an academic job, probably because of my transdisciplinary approach. I was not fitting the pre-defined slots in the academic system. At some point, after I came so very close yet again to being hired but wasn't, I hit a wall. Something broke in me. Some fundamental trust in 'the system' was damaged, and I truly felt the curse of bitterness. I was also feeling ashamed. I could barely look people in the eye, I started to literally look at the walls... such a strange feeling of degradation.

Around that time, while I was spiraling down, a (wise) female friend of mine told me: 'please don't become one of those lovers of mine who became bitter at a certain age because they didn't receive the fair share of recognition they expected from the world.' This line stayed with me, I didn't want to turn into a cliché, you know? And then roughly around that time, I discovered the whole blockchain thing, and I saw it as a way to fight finance on its own ground. It appeared as the possibility to finally start answering this beautiful interrogation coming out of Occupy Wall Street: How to occupy an (financial) abstraction? And I was able to look away from the academic system and embrace a strange alter-financial activist becoming (thanks to Economic Space Agency² ).

I guess what I'm saying here is that we can't take any precursive trust for granted, and we need concrete enough initiatives—however far-fetched they may be!—to activate it.

That's an incredibly valuable anecdote that you shared. I hope we can keep it in. I think it's an incredibly important message for many young academics. That there is a world outside of academia. We can make our own institutions. New socialities of coming together...

Let's see how we edit it :)

I think the question of hope is a very important political question. How do we create it in the face of adversity? The shift from being in academia and being on this track of life, climb the ladder, do the academic thing, and then make the shift outwards to something completely different. So I'm really curious about that. If you're willing to talk about that.

Most of it is concrete and puts flesh on what we're discussing more abstractly before. So, the startup that I joined was founded by a Deleuzian financial theorist, Akseli Virtanen. Not completely disconnected from academia, you know? Actually, he got fired by his academic institution for launching the Robin Hood hedge fund coop... anyway. There was an existential bridge here. These were wild times. We were part of the ICO craze, it was pretty insane. We had a house in Oakland, we had an authentic 'garage'. We managed to get money from an angel investor... I mean, it's a whole story. The angel investor was the ex-World Champion of poker, and we all started playing poker because we were literally learning from the best! (haha)

There was the hope that instead of complaining about the economy as we know it, we could start rewriting the rules of the economy. 'With blockchain, the economy becomes a design question' we used to say. Didn't turn out exactly as promised but it was well worth the ride.

About hope: I kind of resist the term. I can't help finding it lame to claim hope 'in general'. Hope for a better future... hmmm. Hope needs to be buried deep down in your body so that it turns into a belief in the world. Or as they used to say during some protest in France: 'another end of the world is possible!' (haha).

Okay, so this question might be completely separate, but I am interested in blockchain. Whenever I speak to friends or people that are outside of it, one of the common critiques, and I know this is a cliché critique, but they say: 'Oh, these crypto bros are all white, middle-class men with whatever...'

So, when we're talking about it as a design question, and listening to people in that sphere—One of the things, for instance, I come from Africa, right? And one of the things people often say is that this can radically improve access for people in contexts like that. So, as a design question, how do we do that? How do we make it more inclusive? How do we bridge the gap?

Because I'm a left-libertarian, right, so I'm an anarchist, if you want to put a label to it, but a lot of the people in the sphere are libertarian, but right-wing libertarian. Not necessarily super hardcore gun-wielding types...

It goes in all directions, yeah.

But how do we break the left-right duality? As a design question, as a political design question. And how do we design a new type of economy? Because what I see as a potential in this. I see it as a way of channeling Capitalism, Capitalism with capital C, and dissolving it?

Such a big question... So: we need to conceive of blockchain as, above all, an institution-building technology. It has crystallized a widespread desire to move beyond institutional critique—which merely describes what is wrong—toward instituent practices that actually build otherwise. Gerald Raunig made this distinction some time ago, and it remains vital. So, during the Deleuze and Guattari Camp, last week, there was this discussion; Stavros Kousoulas provocatively saying, 'we can't even imagine what life outside of capitalism is because we're entirely, integrally, determined by the conditions...'. I can't quite understand what that means. I guess it depends on how we conceive of institutions? Institutions can be a lot of things. The moment you recognize some patterns of behavior, observe some collective 'choreography of value', some recursive social circuitry, you're entering the realm of institution—and also the possibility to hack them to some extent.

But let me answer your question from a different angle. People engaging in the blockchain world are often animated by a disposition to techgnosis, as Erik Davis calls it³

Basically, these people answer the possibilities of re-coding the body politic through digital means. So, there's a horizon, a techgnostic horizon around blockchain; for good and for bad.

Through the Web 3.0 adventure, the adventure of what comes after platform capitalism and its discontents, I've met lots of people I would have never met otherwise. People coming from wildly different political horizons. In academia, there is a self-selection process that filters away a certain amount of diversity. That's a side effect of using criticality as your credentials, your main existential currency.

And and and: 90–95% of blockchain projects are just scams. Ponzi schemes of different kinds. It's just how it is. Still, I do believe we can't simply discard this technoscape entirely. I do think it is an essential component for imagining systems running on protocols for shared metastability at scale.

Economy or οικονομία in Greek literally comes from οίκος, meaning household, and νόμος  meaning order, law, or even distribution. It is about metastability of a living system, continually organised as you describe it.

It's true. An economy might look like a self-enclosed system, some sort of perfect loop. But it's never exactly the case. It's always bringing in a bit of the future at every round. It's repetition with a difference. It's always moving forward while it's holding something.

How do you relate to the notion of Capitalocene?⁴

Let's say: it all started with the Anthropocene—the recognition of our ecological footprint on the earth. I think Capitalocene is a more useful and precise term. It describes what forces really had an impact on the world, and also specifies which type of 'man'—to echo Patricia Reed's talk—has been having this impact.

So, I'm mostly in favour of using the term, and I guess it begs a further question about how we gather capital, or rather, wealth. You know, the whole thing about primitive accumulation... There is a castle in France that has an inscription that says: 'The most sacred art is making a treasury.' I find it provocative, especially in the context of Web 3.0, which really is simply, at the end of the day, a technology to build decentralised treasuries. It's fundamentally about how we collectively hold value. What are the conditions for holding value together? In which way? I think it's an art that we can reclaim and practice differently, hopefully in a fully decolonial way. And that probably calls for not only a critique of primitive accumulation, but some further venturing in the arts of primitive dissipation (haha).

I think there are two aspects here. I think one needs to discuss that aspect, which relates to the economy, being the household, but as you know, there's a lot of tribalism, right? And I think that has to do with value systems, because you have to understand that the underlying technology is like a constitution.

Yes, it's a constitution-making machine.

So, you can choose which 'State' you belong to, if you will, right?—So, the underlying constitution is what you opt into, right? So, it's no longer based on the place of birth, but rather choice, as to which value system do you want to belong to? And you can belong to multiple ones simultaneously, across multiple blockchain technologies, as a whole...

It's like the 'ideological-scape', ideoscape of blockchain. Exactly.

But you could be in multiple ecosystems simultaneously, right? So it's like keeping your options open, really. But the underlying idea is that: This one works in this way; it has these strengths and these flaws, etc., because nothing's perfect, but it has embedded values written into it.

So that's the one thing one needs to talk about, or what we need to discuss. And the second thing is, when we start talking about a post-human worldview, how do we bring other species, etc. into that discourse?

So, I was mentioning the treasuries. Last November, I co-organized an event with Sovereign Nature Initiative that we called Treasuries for Planetary Survival.⁵ It was all about how to imagine interspecies treasuries to empower ecological initiatives. Think of the financial infrastructure required for empowering creatively the legal rights to rivers or plants, for instance.

That is also anthropocentric. In imagining posthuman or interspecies futures, how can we design value systems that include non-human entities without reinforcing anthropocentric logic? Is it possible to conceive of frameworks, even technical ones like blockchain, that assign value beyond human interest, and if so, what does that require in terms of design?

I don't quite see how we can design institutions AND go fully beyond 'anthropocentrism'. Feels like a typical critical conundrum. But to go back to the first question, one of the core images of the early days of crypto blockchain was the Warring States period in China. You know, before China became an empire, a unified empire for about five-, six hundred years, there were the 'Seven Warring States' competing with one another. Confucius came about as a philosopher in that period, and then other philosophers... It's a different history from Greece. Basically, it's another myth of origin. It's not about the emergence of the polis...

That's interesting, because different philosophical lineages carve nature/technique differently. Do you think blockchain inherits a specifically Western separation (nature vs tech), or does it scramble that distinction in a new way?

Chinese thinking definitely doesn't approach the nature-culture divide in the same way.

I totally agree. So, it's a more ecological way.

So ancient Chinese philosophy is definitely more ecological, but they still had these Warring States. And one of the key images is that back then, Confucius, or Mencius, the follower of Confucius, would say: 'Choose your state according to your values.' People would move from one state to the other according to the rules that were established in each state. So, this image came back full force in the libertarian imaginary of blockchain. The choice to 'exit'. I think it's very limited, to be honest.

But what libertarians are dreaming of right now goes one notch further. They keep talking about 'network states.' Little crypto enclaves you can choose to park your capital into. There's almost nothing good about these network states. It's like challenging the most neoliberal version of the world and going even further.

When does 'keeping value' become world-making rather than accumulation or conservatism in a way?

The best way to answer is perhaps through this little summary of Anti-Oedipus, in words of one syllable, which John Protevi wrote during COVID. It really does it for me, specifically around this question of holding, gathering, stashing some wealth. It goes like:

‘A king will come and want to make the code for a flow and a break and a flow and a break and so on be his code.'

And then it says:

'Us, now? We let the old code break down and now we let a flow and a break and a flow and a break and so on run free! But we too have a code: do what you want as long as you can make a cut in a flow and keep some. It is a hell of a way to run a code; you have to go to the moon and start a war and so on just to keep that code at work.'⁶

It comes down to 'do what you want as long as you can make a cut in a flow and keep some'. Institutions make cuts and also somehow allow us to 'keep some'. Assuming the act of keeping some, defining the terms by which we do it... I guess that brings us near to what sovereignty is about? But what I want to say here is that we need to 'hold' just enough so that when we enter into relation with another person, another situation, you can put something at stake, you can have skin in the game because you initially 'kept some' (reserve of subjectivity, for instance).

How do we define what a treasury is, especially in relation to more than human entities?

I wonder if we could think of your question in relation to a forest. How to value it for what it is, not just as lumber resource (and eventually a soya plantation)? How do we create a value framework to recognize it for what it is? This is one of the key questions of our times. For example, in Brazil, there is an urgent need to figure out a way to sustain people's lives so they don't take down the Amazon. How to value nature in a way that is not anthropocentric? Can an ecosystemic services framework do the job? Seems unlikely...

In a way that respects spatio-temporal cycles.

So not our cycles, but the cycles of the forest.

We are speaking in a language that, for me, is de facto, non-human, non-anthropocentric. A double negation. It cannot be non-anthropocentric.

As humans, we manage to observe cycles of the forest that are way beyond our own temporalities. There's a powerful counter-image that has emerged from anthropological and archaeological research: 'The Amazon is not just a wild forest; it's a garden.' This is a powerful image of the Amazon that suggests deep interspecies collaboration and invites us into participatory modes beyond the human /non-human divide.

I'm Brazilian. I wrote about this. It's called the Anthropic Amazon, and the idea that the Amazon as it is now cannot be natural. It's not naturally occurring.

There are two main lines of evidence proposing that. One is the biodiversity of the Amazon, which is homogeneous, and it's much too large a forest, too large a biome to be homogeneous. It goes from the foothills of the Andes Mountains, to the west, to the coast of Brazil, and that's a long way to go. Some species are all over the place. These species are related to indigenous cultures there. So, the idea is that a lot of these people, who are semi-nomadic, carry the seeds to replant crops. It is a way of living, and they move around; and millennia pass, and they move around a lot and mix, etc. And therefore, they spread these seeds around and create this kind of homogeneous forest all around. Which, of course, multiplies itself, because then it changes the forest, the animals, the fungi, and everything must adapt to these new conditions. To these new species that come from the foothills or come from the coast, and everything gets rearranged in a way that's kind of like quasi-stable (metastable), and works as it is now, but it's in this balance.

Then there's the other line of evidence related to the soil. The black soil. This soil doesn't make sense that there's a carbon-rich, very fertile soil in the Amazonian environment. Actually, the soil of the Amazon is very bad, very neutral, nutrient-poor, but it has this cover layer of organic matter that the forest itself drops, which protects everything and keeps the nutrients, but the soil doesn't hold nutrients. These black soils, however, patches of black soils, they do, and they are scattered all around the Amazon. There is evidence that these are made from the indigenous, not exactly charcoal, but some practice of waste management. How they dealt with waste, and they made these small mounds next to their houses. They threw waste and covered it with dirt, then threw waste covered. A type of compost, naturally.

The thing is, they added biochar, right? So, carbon that's stored creates all these pores that sucks up nutrients and holds nutrients.

They use a lot of fire and use a lot of rocks. So, they made these small mounds, but then that's the thing, they are semi-nomadic, so it doesn't grow too large, it doesn't become a problem. So, it's always this kind of thing (metastable), they move around and create another patch. All patched over after millennia.

So, these two things, soils and patches of forest, plants and so forth. A new forest coat grows in that soil that's slightly different from the other ('natural forest'), but then the forest itself adapts after millennia.

And then recently, we discovered that the trees call for rain over the Amazon.⁷

That I didn't write about, so I'm less confident to comment on that, but there is a strong relationship between rain and Brazil in general, rain in Amazon, places in Brazil such as those in the southeast, São Paulo and Rio, for example, and also my state.

What is your state?

I'm from Minas Gerais. 

We are at the same latitude as the Namib Desert. Across the globe, these latitudes have deserts, but Brazil is a different case, because the Amazon is very wet. And basically, this wetness comes across the Andes, so it kind of curves down. Amazonian moisture hits the Andes and 'curves down' southward, feeding rainfall into central/southern Brazil.⁸

That's how Porto Alegre got recently inundated like never before.⁹

It rains in Minas, Rio and in São Paulo because of the Amazon, so, on the other hand, when we have the Amazon fires, São Paulo woke up black. It was pitch black in the middle of the day because all the smoke from the Amazon was carried by the same currents. So, there is this practice, the whole of Brazilian climate and culture is, somehow, known for being 'the land of the drizzle'. That drizzle comes from this curve. So, it's also reflected in Brazilian culture; they are tied in ways that we don't even really understand.

I cannot describe this scientifically, exactly, but trees emit some biological aerosol particles that then facilitate the formation of rain (ice nucleation particles), which are at a higher (stratospheric) level. So, a third (25–30%) of the rain that comes over the Amazon is self-generated.¹⁰

We can, of course, talk about the different rivers, because, of course, the Amazon is the biggest river in the world, by volume, I think. But the river is only a third of the river system, because there are the aerial river and the subterranean river as well. All three rivers flow simultaneously.

You know, how Wittgenstein talks about his philosophy, you use language as a ladder¹¹ , a scaffold, to get to a certain point, and then you drop the scaffold. Same with blockchain.  We need it to decolonise our economies, to invent new modes of valorisation at scale, because our economies are still human all too human;  but the idea is to work toward planetary regeneration. That's what we need to attune with but we need intermediary scaffolds along the way.

So, could we think of the shift from economy to ecology as a shift from imposition to attunement? I'm thinking specifically about the distinction often made between what is considered 'natural' and what is 'human-made'; two frameworks that tend to reflect different economic logics. From this perspective, infrastructural interventions could be seen as one economy imposing itself on another, reinforcing a human-centric model of value and control. My question basically aims to posit economy as modes of framing our relation to the world.

Maybe simpler, we could read the economy/ecology shift as a shift from control to attunement? And in design terms, when does an intervention become an imposition, and when does it become an amplification of an ecology's own logic?

Our economies abstract ourselves away from the 'ecology'. But we definitely can also learn to attune to the other side of the 'eco'. Ecology used to be called 'the economy of nature'. It had a providential undertone to the expression, as some sort of harmonious equilibrium. But here we need another image of thought, something more 'syntropic', like in syntropic agro-forestry. Indigenous people somehow 'accelerated' the Amazon. Maybe that's the only attunement we are capable of as an over-excited species.

Perhaps instead of viewing this as imposition, we might understand it as a redistribution of potentialities, that is, a reframing of values that could itself be considered ecological.

I think the important thing here is the critique of abstraction, right?

As in: non-extractivist abstraction?

Yes, and I think what you're proposing, and correct me if I'm wrong, hinges on the specificity of place, the specificity of the interaction? Because I think where capitalism went awry was universalization, right?

The notion that we can build modernist architecture in desert Namibia and tropical Brazil, in the same way, and then we start modulating it. Then we start saying 'now we need some shading'. We need some, this and that, but the initial universalization, that's the mistake. So, you have to almost preempt the regionalist question to situate it, then I think there's potential.

Then you also need the planetary factor in that, because there is an interconnectedness, and there is this man-nature division in the Amazon, but there is also the fact that the Sahara Desert is somehow connected to them, and we are still not even realizing how, right? We have some assumptions, and we have some assumptions about a lot of things, but our assumptions are really incomplete. So, when they enter this risk management and value production/discovery, where is the Treasury in that? What is the Treasury in that? For me, that's where the question happens.

What I think is, you need diversity, right? And we're a technological species, right? We need that techno-diversity.

The question is, what exactly are we trying to economize? We are minimizing effort, time, or resources in the name of efficiency, right? For instance, I was speaking with a colleague about a large-scale project they're working on in Dubai, which has a strict two-month deadline. To meet it, they're being economical by reusing an existing design and adapting it to fit the Dubai context. So, what we typically economize is imagination and what does that choice do to the future we produce?

I think, going back to the argument of the Amazonian question, right? People actually also transplanted seeds from point A to point B, right? There was a process of transplanting. The question is, does it take root? Does the seed germinate? And I think that's the question, that's the Treasury question. That's how we need to start thinking. Does something from Greece transplant to Dubai? Clearly not. Or maybe it does, I don't know.

That's where I was going with that value attribution question in relation to temporality, because besides the—this may relate. I don't know, as I said I'm coming from a position of ignorance in many ways, but I have in mind this understanding of the same action as being more valuable now in terms of generating economic value than in the future. So, for me, this is a very fundamental question, especially when we speak about the design of the economy and about speculation of value, right?

So, how can we go beyond that, when at the same time, the impression of spatiotemporal cycles that we are creating, by our presence in this world, is of unbelievable, unanticipated consequences, and is irreversible? So, for me, that's where I would like to hear your perspective on the Treasury. At the end of the day, we're speaking about the seed, but we are not waiting for the seed to germinate, to evaluate it, right? We have pre-evaluated the seed. So, at the end of the day, will it happen? Will it not happen? Who cares?

When you say economy, we hear 'efficiency', efficiency enough within, for instance, the management of resources, but what we're opening up on is what type of humans will learn to attune to the rhythms that will ensure survival on the earth. It's like we can't ask too much of ourselves, or these are different problems. The whole Web 3.0 adventure for me has been about counter-effectuating the economies in this reductive neoliberal sense that we live in. So that's one dimension of the problem.

Speaking of temporality: I find it quite amazing that people keep on building in places like Florida, when we know it's only a matter of time before it all goes below sea level. When is it that the economic logic is going to catch up and it won't be profitable anymore to build buildings in a land that's literally sinking? That's the dramatic economic time frame that we also need to keep an eye on.

So that's a fundamental financial question, financial economics, the further you project out, the more risk you have to factor in, because of variables, things you can't anticipate.

For me, that's where it enters into monopolizing. That's where it enters a question, this notion of the Capitalocene. I have in mind the theories of Moore, specifically Moore, and how he sees this element of free labor in every sense that becomes necessary for any theory of growth. So, when we reach that point and we go back to exhaustion, so what happens there? How do we design value risk in the economy, and take into account degrowth? Or do you think degrowth is necessary?

Two questions back, you were saying, we're a technological species, and we're talking about a certain type of economic abstractions that function within a specific time frame. You know, there are derivative contracts on oil for the next 20 years, that's roughly how far we reach out financially-wise. We can't really factor in, within the set of economic abstractions, anything that goes much beyond that, and it's already wildly approximative. So, just to give a sense, that's a 'meso operational board' that architects also work with, right?

Yes, the two perspectives, the person who is financing it is thinking 20 to 30 years; we are thinking 150 years...

Exactly, then we bring in the Amazonia time frame, we bring in the image that we are actually gardeners of this earth, and then we're amplifying, exploding that initial, relatively short financial timeframe. So pragmatically, like scaffolds, you know, we don't go straight up for 1000 years planning. We are working on these different—actually, 1000 years may be easier to envisage than the next 20 years...? These are different scales of operation.

Conversely, through a more spiritual framing, we need to be less anthropocentric, forget the financial aspects and start learning to live with other rhythms. Both exist at the same time. They are not mutually exclusive.

So, we can't account for consequences that go beyond 20 years?

In the capitalist system, it's getting increasingly difficult, isn't it?

Why don't you think that in this conversation about the design of the economy, we shouldn't enter into that? Why do we still speak about it, 20 years later, in terms of it's just...

No, no, it's just because we're trying to be pragmatic and concrete. This is the frame in which the world that we live in manages its own risks, thus it forces us to limit our time consideration to that. It's just one of the ingredients in what we're discussing right now, our ultimate horizon...

Could I add to your question? I got interested in two factors. The one that I'm interested in is unlocking the value of the creative sector, in terms of regenerating inner cities, and how do I account for that? That was the one aspect of one question I was trying to answer. As an alternative accounting system, right? That's one reason I got interested in it.

The second is that I like trees. I propagate trees, but there's no way for me to participate in an economy. Take carbon credits, there's a double accounting problem, and it's usually for massive projects, and they say, 'We planted this many trees', but then they double accounted...

This is a necessary fiction, carbon credits. This is exactly the type of temporary scaffolding we're discussing.

Yeah. So, I was interested in planting a tree and geotagging it. There it is. It can't be replicated. It's on the blockchain once: That's the tree. And it can grow for 150 years? And I'm not going to see the profit from it, but it's a virtual profit, which again unlocks debt. I can leverage that capital for credit, because that's how humanity works. If I have something, I can say I have this, give me something to do more of what I'm doing, because if I don't hold up a contract, you get this capital.

It's a fundamental problem that humanity is always trying to solve...

I also want to ask, because I worked with a bamboo craftsman, and Brazil is not a country with much bamboo.

Bamboo is one of the plants that absorbs the most carbon. It shoots up very fast, so it consumes a lot of carbon to continue growing. It's grass, so it spreads very fast. The bamboo one sees is a small fraction of the plant, one branch. Most of the plants are underground. So it absorbs a lot of carbon.

So, there was a problem. There was an NGO, and they thought, what if we just sell carbon, based on that? Create an economy. You can have landowners, plant bamboo, if they are not using the land back, from speculation and these sorts of things and make them bamboo crops. But then they were facing this challenge. You have massive production. And they were talking about small landowners, like small farmers that have a piece of land that may be too steep, and then it grows...

Yes, it sounds like a carbon credit scenario, measuring the amount of carbon getting captured.

Lately, with friends, we have been considering the potentials of biodiversity credits. It's funny because in the biodiversity credit industry, there is what they call 'carbon envy', because carbon is a perfect common measure. The moment you have biodiversity credits, things get more complicated. You need some sort of cosmo-financial framework, capable of factoring in incommensurable contributions, and this brings us back to the very beginning of the conversation. The time that it takes for a value discovery process to articulate potential matches between various worlds and offers, without relying on a common, pre-existing denominator (in this case, carbon). Biodiversity credits factor in heterogeneous value flows. It's yet another economic fiction that perhaps could help bridge the economic and ecological imperatives.

In the example Eric described, there is a perverse incentive at play, where an actor optimizes for carbon credits production at the expense of the actual liveliness of the ecosystem. Biodiversity credits reflect better the complexity of ecosystems we are dealing with; but economically speaking, they might not be as operational.

At the end of the day, I believe that biodiversity credits call for highly ritual acts of mutual valuation. Something like proof-of-celebration of aliveness, something along these lines. Because after all, no one biodiversity credit or ecosystem is equal to the other.

Carbon or biodiversity credits are, at the end of the day, just a way to communicate some sort of measurement that is meaningful for people outside the immediate ecosystem. It's a form of monitoring. We don't want to reduce everything to that measurable denominator, but we also do need an accounting structure if we are to govern ecosystems at scale. It's a pragmatic condition. So, right now, carbon credits are kind of working because carbon output is measurable. With biodiversity: What gets measured? That's the question.

Yes, that's a highly complex question.

I mean, it's a diplomatic and cosmo-financial question... but maybe it would be better to just lace water in our favorite localities and force everyone into ecodelic trips so we can accelerate general attunement to the planet's necessities. I confess I often think this would be actually a more realistic and efficient thing to do (haha!).

I think this is a nice note to end our discussion on. It was a big day at the conference, and we don't want to exhaust you even more, Erik. Thank you so much for your time and for sharing your perspectives. And for staying with the complexity, I guess.