Ep 3: Culture, Coordination, and Trust
Guests: Sara Horowitz & Michel Bauwens Series: Network Nations on GreenPill Podcast Listen: Spotify
How commons, mutualism, and entanglement form the backbone of resilient, self-organizing communities that can serve as the foundation for Network Nations.
People Mentioned
| Name | Role / Affiliation |
|---|---|
| Sara Horowitz | Founder, Mutualist Society & Freelancers Union |
| Michel Bauwens | Founder, P2P Foundation |
| Primavera De Filippi | Co-host, researcher at Harvard & CNRS |
| Felix Beer | Co-host, researcher at Harvard & Blockchain.gov |
| David Bollier | Commons scholar, Commons Strategies Group |
| Silke Helfrich | Commons scholar, Commons Strategies Group |
| Will Ruddick | Founder, Sarafu Network |
| Venkatesh Rao | Writer, introduced “Cosmopolis” concept |
| Michael Zargom | Mutualist tech infrastructure researcher |
Organizations & Projects
| Entity | Description |
|---|---|
| P2P Foundation | Global research network on peer-to-peer dynamics |
| Mutualist Society | Organization promoting cooperative economic models |
| Freelancers Union | Advocacy organization for independent workers |
| Sarafu Network | Community currency network (Will Ruddick) |
| Smart (cooperative) | European cooperative with 30,000 full members |
| Broodfonds | Dutch mutual support network |
| Mondragon | Spanish cooperative federation |
| Commons Strategies Group | Research collective (Bollier, Helfrich, Bauwens) |
| Materium | Crowdfunding/crowdlending platform |
| GEN (Global Ecovillage Network) | International network of ecovillages with internal passport system |
Key Concepts
| Concept | Context |
|---|---|
| Commons | Collective stewardship of shared resources — physical, digital, and knowledge |
| Mutualism | Three principles: solidaristic group, economic mechanism, long-term time horizon |
| Entanglement | Voluntary interdependencies created through shared capital, identity, and mobility |
| Cosmo-localism | Combining bioregional horizontal solidarity with global vertical coordination |
| Procession of the commons | Historical cycle: state expansion weakens commons → state decline revives commons |
| Cosmo-local financing facility | Proposal to attract floating capital toward regenerative community investment |
| Deep dives | Method of bringing disconnected movements together for cross-pollination |
| Archipelago of regenerative villages | Third geopolitical option beyond Western liberal and sovereignty-state models |
Transcript
[00:00] I see that we drop the baton. So when I listen to people talking about DAOs, like I literally imagine that they see a stadium that everybody’s sitting there and everybody votes together. And it’s like, you’ve, no, wrong. How can we actually incentivize more of that, not just at the local, local territorial level, but also across community that share similar value and have kinship. So basically I think there’s like models that are,
[00:28] you know, attractors in terms of like thinking about the order of the world. What is a low hanging fruit that we could collectively pick across movements and work together in order to bring this idea of a network nation of you know, like this network of networks of communities on a global scale into existence. Just 1. Welcome back to the Network Nations mini series on the Green Pill podcast.
[00:53] I’m Felix Bär and together with Primavera de Filipe, I’m your co-host for the coming episodes. Across the world, new kinds of civic communities are beginning to take shape. Communities that use decentralized technologies such as blockchain infrastructures or peer-to-peer networks to govern themselves, do a shared resources and act together across borders. We call them network nations and in this series we want to explore network nations as a new design space for
[01:17] civil society in the networked age. Our goal is to chart an alternative pathway from the networked state, 1 where technology serves civil society, not the other way around. Instead of reproducing today’s power imbalances in networked societies, we are asking, what if network societies were built from the bottom up as shared commons, rather than from the top down as startup ventures? What if they treated members as co-creators rather than customers?
[01:40] What if they practiced cooperation and mutual care rather than competition and extraction? And What if they cultivated a sense of sovereignty as a collective good for the many, rather than a private asset owned by just a few? Each episode brings together thinkers, builders, and organizers who are exploring this new frontier of community self-governance together with us, helping us to imagine how a civil society can reclaim
[02:02] political agency in the age of networks. To dive deeper, visit our website, networknations.network, where you find our manifesto and many ways to get involved with our movement. In today’s episode, we’re exploring the role of the commons in the vision of network nations. We’re joined by 2 leading voices in this space, 2 people who have spent the last decades re-imagining how communities can build, own, and govern shared resources.
[02:26] We are super excited to have Sarah Horowitz and Michel Bounce on the show. Sarah is the founder of the Mutualist Society and the Freelancers Union. She’s a long-time advocate for cooperativist economic models and practices and her work really centers around a simple but powerful idea. When traditional institutions fail to meet the challenges of our days, communities need to step in and create systems of care, trust, and solidarity
[02:49] collectively. Michel is the founder of the P2P Foundation, also a frequent guest of the Greenpeal podcast, and he’s 1 of the most influential theorists of the commons economy. Over the last 3 decades, he mapped and supported communities around the globe that use peer-to-peer networks to create and share value collectively. He’s also the author of several landmark works like the Commons Mind Festival, and he writes a brilliant subset called The Fourth
[03:12] Generation Civilization, which we recommend you to check out. Together with these 2 brilliant minds, we want to explore how collective resource stewardship and ownership can build the foundation for network nations and self-sovereign communities in today’s digital age. We want to really dive into questions of how might these communal ideas of ownership help us to move from a fragile, polarized society of individuals towards a more resilient and networked form of interdependence.
[03:40] Thanks for tuning in and let’s dive into it. Great. So thank you for being here, Michel and Sarah. It is a great pleasure. So to start this episode, we would like both of you to kind of describe a little bit your own experience. You’ve both been very involved with many different communities that are operating through like a commoning approach or mutualistic approach, et cetera.
[04:13] So it would be nice to like try to understand what are those communities, why do they choose to operate according to those principles, and also like the extent to which beyond operating with those principles internally as a community, you have also been observing attempt or effective achievement of interconnecting among other community that also operate of the same type. So I founded the P2P Foundation in 2005. And you know, I, so basically
[04:50] I started observing the, you know, the scene, so for about 20 years now, right? And I using, I use the, I use a wiki to document what I see. And so I would kind of have, I would recognize 3 periods in my research. The first 1 is free software communities, open knowledge, open design. So, you know, 93 creation of the web and the browser, democratize access to the
[05:18] networks, and people start sharing massively code, knowledge, and design. So that’s my first serving was like, how do they work? Now I would not consider these like network nations or mutualistic. They’re like productive organizations. They do things together, but I’m not very much aware of any solidarity arrangements or… You’re pretty much on your own.
[05:47] You know, you have to have state support or corporate support or you’re a freelancer, but it’s like, it’s very focused on doing something particular. Then there’s a second group of communities that I looked at and this would, I would call them the urban and the rural commons. And this is already a bit different, because this is local, and there is a paradox that I want to mention
[06:11] here. So, you know, these people know each other. So there’s like a pragmatic solidarity, you know, it’s what you do with people you know, if you see them really suffering, you might want to do something about it. It’s not, they’re not like formally organized to do that, but you can just feel there’s already a different atmosphere. But there’s a paradox which is, you know, so there’s a local level and it’s
[06:40] very local and they hardly work together with other people doing the same things which are like close by. So typically a permaculture, you know, East in Ghent may not work together with permaculture West in Ghent. But they do have this global permaculture design community. So there’s a lot of learning going on. There’s events, online events, physical events, courses. So this circulating at that level, and then it’s very local at the same
[07:17] time. So that would be, you know, so far as I can kind of remember my observations. Then the third type of community I looked at is Web3. There, I feel there’s a paradox. So I think the tension in Web3 is between a very strong individualism, because they’re libertarian, most of them. Like they’re very libertarian in their ways of thinking. They want freedom above all, But
[07:45] then there’s community. And it’s not necessarily that they think about this together, they just do it. So there’s very strong community. And so I was actually pleasantly surprised, and that’s where I met also you guys, in Sousa-Loup Montenegro. I was very pleasantly surprised by the amount of solidarity that was obvious there. I wasn’t doing very well at the time and I got my taxes paid and
[08:15] I just had to say something and somebody would… So I thought that was impressive. And the capacity, the pluralism of it was also very, very amazing in my view. And so that created an attachment on my part on the Web3 ethos because I thought, yeah, this is very human in some way. So it’s a bit paradoxical. So, but none of these movements, are like formerly the solidaristic, right?
[08:50] They’re just people doing stuff together. But so, if I take on my historical hat, so basically, when I talk about the procession of the commons, if you remember that, is the idea is that we have periods in history where, you know, where societies do well, there’s a centrifugal pressure, things get organized, integrated, centralized, and the state, you know, takes care of its citizens or whatever the state form is, and that has
[09:24] the paradoxical effect that you become a consumer of the state, right? In a way, you become a consumer of the services of the state, and that dilutes the horizontal self-organization, solidaristic elements. And then in periods when the state and the market function less well and you have disintegration, centripetal, disintegrating, decentralizing pressures, People are in a stress situation of like, where do I get support?
[09:58] Where do I find a job? What happens if I lose my job? All these questions come up and that will create a pressure for people to go back to real solidarity because they are not getting it from the state. And I think this is where we are. We come from a long period in which we didn’t have to do that and therefore, lots of the commenting that took
[10:23] place wasn’t yet informed by this really need to survive. It was passion, passionate projects, things we want to do, we look for meaning in our lives. We find people everywhere in the world who want to do the same. But it wasn’t like, I have to make sure that people have my back. And I think that is changing. So I think people right now are very much
[10:49] looking into that. And that’s, I think, where network nations come in as 1 of the ways of thinking of like, how do we create real solidarity? And I always like to say, maybe a bit provocatively, but that sacrifice and solidarity are the 2 requirements for community, for a real community, right? If you don’t have that, you’re playing. If there’s a bit of pressure, you move
[11:15] around. But if you have those 2 things, then you start accumulating power because people will act in concert to protect something. And we’re not there yet, but we are moving in that direction because things are obviously not going well in the world. So I think this is, of course, depending where you live, you know, I live in Asia where things are seemingly still going well. And so, you know, there’s a
[11:42] bit more social welfare now than 5 years ago. And maybe that’s still the case in China, but certainly in Europe and the US, the trend is the other direction, right? So that it depends also a bit where you are. Yeah. And on your side, Sarah, like what are the, what are the, your own experience of those communities? Yeah, I think that the way Michelle is describing the role
[12:07] of the state is actually quite interesting and I’ll get to that in a minute. You know, I have been organizing freelance workers. I found that very interesting what you were saying about the first phase. And freelancers were really, to me, the people who were starting to organize around their own needs because they had fallen out of the social safety net. And so, to me, they were the architects of building what they
[12:33] needed. And I would say that to me has always been the way that any of this starts is, what is it that more than 1 person needs that you have to do in a group in order to succeed? If you can do it on your own, you really don’t need this. If you actually need to form a worker cooperative or a food purchasing organization or
[12:53] a community garden, you cannot do that alone. And so it’s really starting from that through line of need of how groups then start to organize themselves in having more and more complexity in that arrangement. And so what I think is very interesting is in the last 2 years, I’ve been organizing the mutualist society and really talking to mutualists globally and finding that it really is this notion of, I’d say, an isolation
[13:27] where different groups are starting to kind of emerge, starting to then see who else is doing this, and to start to see what are some problems that are affecting the whole group, which to me is the opportunity for the network nations is to start to say, wait a minute, this probably isn’t going to be a strictly libertarian operation. There’s going to be some need to start to look at what are the
[13:55] decisions that we need to make in order to enable these groups to grow such that we start at a base and that base then grows is woven and connected together by their needs and their decisions and that that actually is the quarterbacking for how you build policy. And so I think 1 of the most important things is, and let me just say, I think that there’s a very interesting Venn diagram around
[14:25] commoning and mutualism. And mutualism, there’s 3 principles. 1 is it has to have a solidaristic group. And by that, it just means that, you know, whether you’re a knitter or a farmer, you kind of know who’s a knitter and a farmer, and you kind of know who isn’t. It’s not just open. It’s not a park. It’s not a library. Parks and libraries are wonderful. They’re just slightly different.
[14:46] The second is it has to have an economic mechanism. It has to be services or dues or a lending circle. And the third is that it has to have a long-term time horizon. So to me what I think is interesting about Network Nations as a concept is looking for the organizations that have a commoning orientation and a mutualist orientation, and maybe
[15:08] even others that in creating that ecosystem. And that’s what I think is interesting is to see it in a kind of mosaic and weaving rather than a monolith. I wanted to make a small remark on the relation between commoning and mutualism. I find it very interesting and fruitful. I have a slightly different framing in which I look at it historically. So you have basically physical commons and the focus is
[15:35] not on solidarity but on common access to resources that people need. So fisheries and mountain flanks and common pastures, all of that. When we have the big enclosure movement in the 16th century and even earlier in the 13th century, and people start being chasing away to the cities as proletarians, that’s when mutualism becomes a big need because they mutualize risk, life risk.
[16:03] And that’s, I think, where mutualism then comes from. And it wasn’t invented then because it existed in the free city states of the Middle Ages and in the Ottoman Empire. So, guilds and stuff is pretty standard stuff. But I think, you know, there is a very strong relation between commenting and mutualism. Their domains are different, but I think, you know, there’s a family link. So I just wanted to say that.
[16:36] Thanks. Yeah, I just want to come in real quick. So you both kind of described this macro historical and political trend that forces more and more communities into considering, you know, to organize in these mutualistic or solidaristic ways. And we see this all over the place, right? Popping up like communities organizing often on a local level, but they are very much in a patchwork at the moment,
[16:58] right? In the commons community and in the mutualistic community, I think we are observing the same thing, even the web free space. So there’s a clear need and desire to collectively organize at a scale where you can have actually an impact. But, and as you both say, like network nations can provide like an institutional wrapper to facilitate this kind of governance at like the network level.
[17:21] So integrating all these local nodes into a larger political entity. But this is obviously a consideration which is also not completely new and there have been attempts in the past in both of your communities, I suppose, as well, right, the comms movement and the mutualistic movement. So why have we not seen the emergence of such an entity and what would a network nation have to look like in
[17:45] order to actually facilitate that effectively? I really think something happened in the 1990s when we started talking about scale, that it actually trips us up because it makes us feel like we need to start at a point of impact first. And what we really have to see is that it’s a runway. And so what I think really the secret here is for me, 1 of the
[18:08] biggest issues is people need access to appropriate capital. There are no capital markets that are really appropriate except somewhat in Spain, somewhat in Italy, and probably in other places too. But it’s realizing that you have to start with this patchwork of groups and really find out what they need, and then keep letting them grow. And then the policy can come in to start to change laws.
[18:35] If you look at Madrigal in Spain, it’s exactly how it started, right? It started as a training educational program amidst a fascist government. By the time it started reaching maturity, instead of living in the cracks and crevices, it started to dictate policy. And now it’s the economic juggernaut of the region. And I was just there, and you can be sure that the top officials not
[19:01] only have ministers there, but they’re there. So I think they’re the metaphor in many ways for that. I would like to stress the importance of, you know, some transcendent element to achieve a high levels organization as well. So I think, you know, first you have religions and the guilds are linked to religion, you know, like every guild in Italy has a patron saint and it’s linked to the local and probably, you
[19:30] know, larger church as well. And it also motivates people to organize the higher scale. Then, you know, after secularization sets in in the West, we have ideological movements. You know, I used to be part of the socialist movement when I was younger, and it was still, you know, really strong and people believed in it. And, you know, every village in the Flanders where I lived had a people’s house
[20:00] and the socialist pub. And, you know, I mean, so there was something there that bound people together. And I think we are still missing that. So we’re still missing some kind of motivational ideology that we don’t have, you know. And in my more naive years, I thought, commoning, the ideology of the commons might be that, but it hasn’t really, I don’t feel it has happened.
[20:28] And paradoxically, I do think the blockchain has actually that kind of effect. You know, this kind of particular… I know it’s provocative, but I like to say that probably to provoke. You know, I say blockchain is Jesus, right? Because, you know, I follow coach Nkarotani’s idea that people always want to go back to this convivial stage at a higher level of complexity, right?
[20:51] So you have commoning and gifting. That’s what people want, you know, to trust people, to have friends, to have family, that everything is smooth and warm, but then civilization destroys that. And then we want to go back so we do that first through world religions and then through these secular utopian movements and I think we are the stage of constructive networks but what can bind those constructive networks is not clear yet
[21:16] but certainly blockchain ideology itself paradoxically functions right Like many people know DAOs don’t really work very well and it doesn’t matter. It’s the belief in DAOs that functions to bind people together. But is that enough for the broad mass? I don’t know yet. So I would also like to introduce a concept that I myself just learned about from Venkatesh Rao, which I think is very illuminating, which is
[21:47] cosmopolis, right? So I used to think that, you know, with digital technology we now have something entirely new that can create these network nation and translocal organization, but he reminded me that, No, this has been going on forever. So we always had a mix of territorial and non-territorial. The Pope, the Caliph were already the heads of non-territorial communities.
[22:13] And so you always have Cosmopolis, you know, more or less organized from the Republic of Letters, which is like more like informal to very, you know, international guilds and all kinds of really existing transnational… Of course, now we have a technology which kind of supercharges it, I still think that is true. But what is going to bind it? This is my big question. I don’t know. And right now it’s the blockchain,
[22:42] which is, you know, the most, let’s say, the most imaginative, ambitious people, they’re thinking blockchain. But there’s still such a rift between that layer, that cosmopolitan layer, if you like, of post-national kind of mentalities and the people who are rooted still in their region and locality and may not think that way at all and may even reject it for, you know, because they don’t like technology or…
[23:14] So We have a problem here that I don’t know yet how humanity is going to solve. Yeah, I’m actually, I want to take the opportunity to actually bring… So if I understand correctly, what you’re saying is like, there is the commoning, which is managing common pool resources or putting resources in common, which can become then mutualized resources to some extent. But that’s really more on the production and consumption level.
[23:43] And then you have like the mutualist approach, which is more like the solidarity of like, we want to make sure that everyone is fine. And so we’re going to provide services and support each other, right? What are… So 1 of the questions I think that we’re also trying to understand is like, those… We can observe a lot of realities in which those things happen,
[24:06] but we can observe less so. Maybe like some, some exceptional case of course exists, but it’s not a common practice that we can see these intra-community. So multiple community that have their own commoning and perhaps their own mutualist approaches, that all of a sudden are like, well, actually, I want to come on, or I also want to extend my mutualistic approach to other communities.
[24:32] And I think, Michel, that’s pretty much what you’re touching on, which is the question of like, why would we do that? It is easy in the local territory where there is this kind of like relation, it becomes much harder when we move outside of a territory where this relationship doesn’t exist. And I think this is where we come in with the network nation approach, which is, well, actually, we can see that
[24:56] there is reasons to do that when and only when there is this sense of community, this sense of kinship, this sense of nationhood that emerge, in which I want to protect my people, I want to know that the people that are part of the same tribe, they feel good. And so this goes beyond a collective or a guild of fishermen wanting to manage a fishery, but it’s actually, I want to make
[25:21] sure that everyone is okay. So we have this word within like the network national approach, which is entanglement, which I would love to actually pick both of your brains on that because like, I feel like I would say entanglement is probably both a consequence but also a source of mutualism, meaning that if I’m entangled with people I will be more likely to want to make sure that everyone is okay.
[25:51] But also as I engage in those practices, I am creating kinship with those people. And I will say perhaps commons is the same, which is like, I will choose to put things in common with the people that I care about and that I want to support. But the fact that now we have stuff in common, we’re entangled. So I would love to hear from both of your sides, first of all, how
[26:12] do you see the relationship between commoning, mutualism and entanglement? And if you have ideas, because we’re exploring those questions, if you have ideas about like building from the scholarship of common and the empirical example of commoning and mutualism, it’s like, what can we do? Like, how can we actually incentivize more of that, not just at the local, local territorial level, but also across community that share similar
[26:41] value and have kinship. So I recently wrote an article on the geopoliticals cosmolocalism. And so basically, I think there’s like 3 models that are attractors in terms of like thinking about the order of the world. And so there is like a Western model, you know, based on individualism, conflict, democracy, markets, trade. And I think it’s kind of represented by the WEF, the World Economic Forum.
[27:15] And the idea is, you know, multi-stakeholder domains with finance, capital, weak nation states and approved NGOs. And they kind of, an expert class that decides how to organize these different domains, but there’s no people, there’s no sovereignty anymore. It just kind of disappeared. And then there’s this other force that wants to go back to sovereignty. And that is Russia, China, the BRICS.
[27:44] And they kind of want to go back to the United Nations, but without Western hegemony and even with civilizational elements infused. So, people talk about the civilization states approach like a post-wave Westphalian nation state approach. So, that’s the other model, right? Where it’s kind of paradoxical, they’re more authoritarian, but they actually believe in popular sovereignty in their way of thinking. Like the Chinese party believes it represents the people.
[28:15] They really believe that. And that’s the model they have. And it seems that the Western model is declining and that that model is going up and who knows for how long and because there’s climate issues, there’s resource issues, there’s danger of hegemonic war. So, it’s hard to say how these things will evolve. But I think that there’s a third option. And I called it the archipelago of
[28:45] regenerative villages. And I think, especially for example in Europe, which is decaying very fast in my view, because I travel there like every 18 months and it’s just Like every time I go there, it’s worse than the last time. And the same in the US. I was in San Francisco recently and I thought, oh my God. You know, anyway, so it’s decaying. And paradoxically, that motivates people, right?
[29:14] More to have, to look for alternatives. And we have very strong civil society with highly educated people and so that third option I think is is is real is like people doing things on the ground because they want a better life more meaning more solidarity and then they look like how can we how can we get stronger okay so this gets me to the entanglement issue, and especially around capital.
[29:44] Because if you look at it, and I did this study in Ghent in 2016 or 17, and I looked at 500 urban commons, and typically there were 2 people working half-time for an NGO and getting burnouts every 5 years and being replaced by other people. Like that’s the scene. So the people doing all this extraordinary good work, they’re impoverished, they’re precarious, they don’t have capital. And so, you know, and that’s the
[30:13] paradox. If you do something regenerative, there’s no capital. And I think there’s an opportunity and that’s what I call the cosmo-local financing facility, right? And I use the historical analogy of, so the Roman Empire is going down and people are leaving the cities and you have these monasteries that are doing well and people are, you know, looking to live around them. And at some point there is
[30:39] kind of a merger between the old Roman elites and the church and they start investing in it because it’s in their interest, right? And so I see today this 3000000000000 dollars of floating capital, an exit strategy from post-national people, but it’s not going to work because people are going to go after them with pitchforks when things get really bad. And so I think there is an historical opportunity to attract part of
[31:08] that capital for investing in regenerative entities. And that I think is where the network nations come in. Like I see federations or regenerative projects creating common digital identities and trying to attract this kind of capital. And there the entanglement would be in terms of micro capital, right? Because I think This is very important, like Materium, I really like what they’ve been doing. You know, it’s basically, you can bypass venture capital, big
[31:38] banks, BlackRock, by doing crowdfunding, crowdlending, crowdinvestment. And so you can imagine forms of capital where you have like 70% local and 30% non-local, right? So you keep control of the local, but you attract these people. And it sounds like utopian, but that’s how the Middle Ages worked. This is how the Ottoman Empire worked. This is how pre-modern decentralized societies worked.
[32:11] They had, you know, people were very local and people were moving around like the guilds, the cathedral builders. So I think this is possible and I personally want to work to make that possible. So that’s kind of entanglement, is this kind of combination of, let’s say, the bioregional guilds and the cosmolocal guilds. Bioregionalism functions as a horizontal solidarity, all people doing different things in the same region,
[32:44] and cosmolocal is all people doing the same thing all over the world. And those 2 things come together to create like a defense mechanism for this archipelago. And they can have good relationships locally if they want to, if they can. But if they don’t get local friendly state, they can defend themselves to that translocal aspect. So to you the entanglement, just to understand, you’re using the word entanglement to
[33:12] describe that interweaven network of financial investments? Yeah, yeah. But also, you know, people that can move around, you know, So for example, you have a network of ecovillages and I heard they have a passport now, you know, the GEN, what’s it called? I forgot the name, but you know, there’s like a global organization for ecovillage. They don’t call it a passport because they don’t want to attract attention, but they
[33:43] have some kind of password. They have some kind of password. So this is like really interesting that they’re doing that so that people can move between those eco-villages and they have some kind of privileges because they belong to that federation. So it’s like a mutualized identity system. Yeah. Identification system. Watch the guilds in the Middle Ages. If you were a member of a guild
[34:06] in the Middle Ages, you had halfway houses throughout Europe and the Mediterranean. If you were part of a Venetian guild, you could go to Marrakesh, you could go to Ghent, and there’ll be a house for you. This is what I’m really worried about. I think that when I look at the energy needs of AI and data centers, and I look at foreign policies of nation
[34:32] states are now enabling that growth at an exponential and existential rate, I start to really worry about, And I hear a lot of talk, and especially in Montenegro, of exit, that people are thinking about a nation state or a network state as a way for a group of people who have the most means to exit a lot of things that planet Earth is having a problem with.
[35:08] I take that really seriously. And so when I look at how are we building, I really am trying to think about how do people start to organize to get food, shelter, housing, health, that in this context. So it’s not abstract at all. Not that this whole, this conversation has been abstract in any way, but I think the outside looks like we’re discussing this in a laboratory, but I don’t think any
[35:36] of us actually feel like we are. So to me, in that, the idea of entanglements is that we’re gonna have to start to work together. You know, it’s a wonderful thing to be an individual if you’re young and rich, right? It’s never better. You can do what you want and you don’t have obligations. But the truth is in unions and cooperatives and in faith communities, you know that
[36:00] something’s real because people don’t get along because they’re human and there are mechanisms for them to navigate that. And that is just at the node level. But that I think what we’re going to need around these entanglements is actually looking at the metaphors for the federated bodies that always exist. So every trade union has a federating system of different locals to different nationals.
[36:29] And then even the national unions have international federating bodies. And so they didn’t come out of some abstraction, they came out of actually figuring out needs and trade and trading information. So I think that there’s something about in this context that we are going to start to see this need for people to start to federate and figure out what those practices are.
[36:58] I don’t think that starts with government, actually. I think that that starts with people coming together and then saying what it is they need. Right now, I think what they need is capital and so that you can start to have these groups have the ability to grow. And they need to grow either with something that is like a grant or a very low interest loan and starting
[37:23] to go from there. Yeah, I think that’s a really good point. And I think Like the narrative of exit is precisely what we, with the network nation thing, are trying to countervail with actually not just saying we don’t want to exit, but actually saying that interdependence is desirable. It’s something we have to cope with anyways, like we cannot escape from it. But actually, we even want more of it
[37:50] because we want to be more entangled with the people that we resonate with and with whom we want to have this kind of solidarity. 1 thing that I really am seeing that I think is an interesting issue. And Michelle sort of was talking about this a bit too, is I look at the way people in Web3 organize and the way I think of it is these
[38:14] generations that came before up to the 90s were passing the baton because they had institutions that taught 1 generation how to manage and to build for the future. And then after the 90s, when we destroyed so much of the social sector, both especially in the United States, I see that we drop the baton. So when I listen to people talking about DAOs, like I literally imagine that they
[38:38] see a stadium that everybody’s sitting there and everybody votes together and it’s like, you’ve, no, wrong. And the level of sophistication and governance is so shocking from such very intelligent people. And I would say that has been very striking to me in 2 years that people don’t understand it’s not just quadratic voting, it’s really having forms of delegation of authority and power and that those aren’t bad things.
[39:03] They just have to be designed properly by people with an ability to iterate when they don’t work and they don’t work all the time. Yeah, I think there’s a great relearning that is taking place. And I think there’s a psychological change. When you have the level of social disintegration that we see in the West, people are going to get experiences where it becomes
[39:29] really important, like who can I count on? I had that myself and my life has changed. Like I always say I’ve become more futile and I mean that in a special way that I want to be able to trust the people I work with. You know, not that they like look the other way when something happens. You know, when you’re in a rich and you can go anywhere that doesn’t matter
[39:53] so much, but it is going to start to matter more and more. And So, you know, we’ll have to go in like an accelerated learning, because it’s becoming existential to find these ways of solidarity. But I see it happening in many different ways. You know, like the Broodfonds in Holland, you know, I work for Smart, which has 30, 000 full members and 300, 000 light members.
[40:30] I think people are starting to look, and I think you should look at exit not just in a negative way. There’s a negative exit, which is, as long as I make it, I don’t care. But there’s also a positive exit, it’s like the old system doesn’t work anymore, and we have to find another way to do things and to survive. So I would also think that exit in terms of like when
[40:52] you realize that maybe you’re not gonna get your pension that you counted on and that’s also an exit. You didn’t choose it. It’s because your society is not working as well as it used to and so, if you think about the middle ages, all the people in the cities in Europe were farmers who fled the farm, right? There was a law that if you fled 1 year and your master didn’t catch
[41:27] you, you were free. And so they end up in these cities and they have nothing. Nothing. You know, there was no state. So that’s where the guilt comes from, from like a really, you know, existential motivation, like we can only count on each other. And those times, I think, are coming back. I want to poke at the question of exit a little bit further, because I think it’s another important point that
[41:55] we’re trying to elaborate and crystallize with the network nation framework, which is 1 way is exiting and the other way is, is like, which is substrative, is like, I’m leaving this system and I’m going to another system. And when we’re thinking in terms of the network nation, we’re thinking more in an additive layer, which is like, we’re not really exiting, we’re just adding something in order to fill the gap, right?
[42:22] Because that’s where, that which the state is no longer providing, that which the corporate world is providing in a slightly distorted manner, It’s not that we want to exit the system, it’s just that the system needs more. And I think this is like the more traditional commons approach, which is not like we’re exiting everything and we’re off-grid, it’s rather let’s bring the commons back into the picture, but it doesn’t require exiting.
[42:48] It’s actually quite the opposite. It’s like, let’s be even more entangled and let’s add an additional layer. Yeah, but it’s also the system is exiting you, right? The system is exiting you because they’re no longer providing support. Right, right, right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I think there is an important distinction to be made between the more libertarian approach of like, I’m exiting, the government is failing
[43:09] me, I’m exiting and I’m starting something from scratch with all the complexity that this entails versus the government is failing me. How do I fill the gap? And potentially, how do I find partnership in the same way as like, you know, public commons partnership that can be… I think there’s something else here, which is you need these organized institutions of people who have their own power and resources and self-financing
[43:40] because they actually have to exist as a counterweight. They are a check and balance. Like part of what has happened in the last 30 years is the governments, even in Europe, really have been backing the corporate interests so much more. And so they’re now able to look at, you know, antitrust laws and the platforms. Now there’s a time to say, it’s not that we’re asking government to be kind
[44:09] and nice, it’s that people have the authority and power because they can make change happen. And I think that we shouldn’t forget, like commoning and mutualism are really, really the keys and they’re the keys and the root system to actual building power. And that I think is what we really have to be thinking about here because you wanna create not just incentives for people to get together, but to have the
[44:39] authority to determine what happens to the water that we drink. How are we enriching the soil? How are we preventing climate change? All of those were changes that happen not because we were having an earth that was focused on humanity per se. And I think what’s interesting is that, and I think both of you are riffing on this, is that with network nations and similar
[45:07] frameworks, we are not trying to build power from an individualistic point of view, right? Like the network state in comparison is a quite libertarian or corporate model, right? The inspiring book is of course, The Sovereign Individual, which tries to use network governance in order to enhance individual autonomy basically, right? The starting point here is quite different. So we are thinking about self-sovereign community networks, which are bottom-up organizing around shared needs
[45:36] and urgencies actually in the world in order to enhance collectively the impact. So it’s a very different theory of power and theory of change. And I think also something, Michelle, you touched on it as well, is if we are thinking now about the institutional wrapper we need to build in order to facilitate this kind of like bottom-up community governance, then it’s not enough to think about like
[45:59] technological systems, right? Like a DAO is a nice thing, but it is not an institution itself. An institution is a socio-technical system. So it has on the 1 hand side, like sophisticated governance designs which allow to organize at scale, but it also needs a shared culture and identity, like a sense of nationhood, a sense of shared belonging, and some sort of like, you know, forms of legitimacy, accountability, and responsibility.
[46:26] So norms and values that make the thing be operational. And that’s often lacking. I mean, Web3 is building a lot of interesting tooling. It’s lacking the institutional dimension and the national dimension. So I just want to ask the 2 of you, what are actually the next steps we can take in order to build these more sophisticated, more embedded kind of institutional forms that are actually enabling
[46:53] communities to scale up from the bottom, from the grassroots to a global trans-local scale. You know, I’ve been thinking about that a lot in the 2 years with the Mutualist Society because, you know, Michael Zargom and others have really been thinking about mutualist tech infrastructure. And I find there’s kind of a paradox. On the 1 hand, it’s very easy to enter and start anything, you know, with
[47:17] Squarespace and Substack and everything is so plug and play, but it gets you onto the wrong highway. And so it kind of helps you get the first few miles going. And so I’ve really been thinking a lot about, and I think this is not unusual to think about, how do you put things in technological systems that are a little bit rudimentary in the beginning? And I say that really importantly.
[47:46] So keeping track, 1 of the biggest things I think is an example of let’s say a Facebook group. Like what’s wrong with a Facebook group? Well, they don’t give you notifications like you need to elect leaders. Why don’t you start passing the hack and having a due system? They don’t want you to build independent institutions because you would exit.
[48:04] And so what is really important is to use the platforms to start and really start to hack at them to figure out how you then build something. And I would say that’s like a very practical step for the here and the now. But I think that goes to the idea of a network nation is to start to pay attention to what would be systems that are useful and how do
[48:30] you create processes? Because I think that starts building the infrastructure for governance. And that really is the important thing. Like you don’t have to get things right. You just have to have the ability to change them when they go wrong. And that’s called iteration. We all know that’s really important. So yeah, I think that to me, building mutualist tech infrastructure is really important.
[48:52] I think that, you know, it’s to start from the people, right? So for example, 1 of my frustrations with Web3 is, okay, you’ve got these amazing funding mechanisms but it’s coders applying for funds as coders and they say, oh, we should do this, we should do that. For example, oh, let’s have a piece of software that connects organic consumers and organic producers. Well, guys, there’s like maybe 400 of
[49:19] them already. Why don’t you check it? Why don’t you know that? But they don’t. And they don’t make it up. And so they’re completely divorced from the kind of communities that I studied in 2017, the urban and the rural commons. And so I think it has to be turned around. It’s like these people who are doing this, and they’re like small groups of people
[49:42] who trust each other at first, and then they slowly scale, and these people need tools to scale. But why don’t we have people who ask them what they want, right, and start from their needs. And so that’s hardly happening. And so that’s the problem today. And that’s what I want to change is that this complete disconnect between these 2 worlds is detrimental. Right.
[50:12] Can I maybe follow up real quick on this point? Because I think it’s interesting. So what would be needed in order to flip this around? Well, you know, I think there’s a really good example about mutual aid networks, which have cropped up everywhere all the time. 1 of the things that I’ve watched is the foundation worlds go in to fund them. And instead of saying, what do
[50:31] you need? How do you build it? It’s here’s the advocacy agenda. Can you make sure to plug into that? And that advocacy agenda was very typically created by management consultants. And under the category of you can’t make this stuff up, it hasn’t built that kind of infrastructure. So I think it really is maybe looking for 1 example that might be widespread and start to try to build that and
[51:02] watch how that grows. Because I do think that sometimes it gets very heady, that we wanna think about the complex infrastructure, but actually, when you get down to it, I really think you’re walking around with your yellow pad and you’re saying like, what do you need? And you’re deeply listening and you’re seeing the patterns and you’re network building from there, which is kind of like what entrepreneurs know how to do.
[51:28] So we do need to go back to that orientation, I think. Yeah, you know, 1 of the things that I wanted to do with my wiki is that, you know, really let people know what is working, because I personally believe, you know, yes, there’s a lot of experimentation, you know, and that’s good and healthy, But in the end, it’s a few things that work really well that get emulated
[51:49] and become the norm. And people tend to forget that. It’s not just like 1000. For example, Will Ruddick with Sarah Fudop Network is now doing very well. And people are flocking to it because it’s working. And so whether he is a perfect system or not doesn’t matter because it’s working well enough. And so that gets emulated, right? And so I think that also these
[52:13] stories should be circulating what is working. And it’s never like the best technical system that is working. It’s almost always like a mismatch of things that just pragmatically were put together, but because of the charisma and the trust of a small group of people, that is what gets emulated. And so this kind of human experience is what we need to pay much more attention to. And also when we often talk about
[52:41] the strategy of how to build like sophisticated governance, many people often apply very managerial engineering mindset in terms of linear planning, right, Michel, that’s something you, I think, like build on right now. Like there is this idea that we can foresee a specific future and then we can have like, you know, backward planning and like define steps and then technical mechanisms to achieve these steps. But that’s not how the complexity of
[53:05] the world often works, right? We know- I look at history. Learning cycles, right? It’s iterative learning. And in this way, it’s also a collective endeavor because we can learn from each other’s best practices, but also from each other’s failures. But we need this collective sense-making infrastructure in order to weave these experiences together. So maybe, do you have some concrete idea? Because like Network Nations and many other
[53:28] approaches are in urgent need for this kind of sense-making infrastructure? How can we build this, you think? So this is what I would do. So, you know, some years ago I was working with David Bollier and Silke Helfrich, the common strategies group, and we would do deep dives, right? And deep dives were like every 6 months, we did that for 5, 6 years
[53:49] in a row, 25, 30 people, 5 days, and bringing 2 different groups together, like the commons and the co-ops, the Commons and Ethical Finance, the free software and open hardware. And they, like, to your surprise or maybe not, they actually didn’t talk to each other, you know, even though they’re the same ethics, but they didn’t talk to each other. And, you know, by letting them know their language, their subjectivities over time,
[54:23] it was amazing. 18 months after our deep dive, there would always be like 5, 6 projects that didn’t exist before. So I would do that domain specific. Let’s get people doing organic food. Let’s bring them together and get Web 3. And let them talk together so that they know, so that the people who do this high level coordination, you know, can actually start understanding what the needs are of
[54:56] the people on the ground. So that’s what I would do, you know, to stimulate this connection between those 2 worlds that are not talking to each other. Because I do think that, you know, if we want social power, we do need some of these tools. We need capital, we need fast learning, we need… I think that’s our only hope, because I think the, you know, the rapidity of
[55:23] the interlock between all these crises is not going to give us the luxury of a hundred years to get this right. So what is a low hanging fruit that we could collectively pick across movements and work together in order to bring this idea of a network nation of, you know, like this network of networks of communities on a global scale into existence? Just 1.
[55:51] Well, I mean, I think it’s really about getting the conversations going. That it’s about people in what are kind of peer circles that start to talk and say, how can we work together? And I feel like having mutualist infrastructure tools that help groups form in the same way that Stripe helps any e-commerce company. If there were better tools for people to start organizing, to start building shared
[56:16] resources, you know, tools that help you set up a mutual aid network, tools that help you run a cooperative, tools that help you do participatory budgeting. If those tools were as easy and available as Shopify is for commerce, I think we would see an explosion of this kind of organizing. And I think that’s actually a very concrete thing that the Web3 community could contribute to.
[56:42] And the second thing is what Michel said about the deep dives, bringing different worlds together. I think there’s something really important about creating spaces where the commons people and the Web3 people and the cooperative people and the mutual aid people actually sit in the same room and realize they’re working on the same problem from different angles. And that cross-pollination, I think, is where the magic happens.
[57:08] And it’s also where the kinship starts to build, right? Because once you’ve spent 5 days with people working through these ideas, you have a relationship. You have something that’s stronger than just intellectual alignment. You have an experience of working together. And that, I think, is the seed of what becomes a network nation. So my low-hanging fruit would be: build the tools and create the spaces. Do both at the same time.
[57:35] Wonderful. Thank you both so much. This has been an incredibly rich conversation. I think we’ve touched on so many dimensions of how commons and mutualism can really build the foundation for network nations. And I love that we ended on something very practical, which is build the tools and create the spaces. So thank you, Sarah. Thank you, Michel. And thank you all for listening. Stay tuned for the next episode where we’ll be exploring the concept of entanglement in more depth.
Key Themes
- Three phases of commons evolution: open source production → urban/rural local commons → Web3 communities
- The “procession of the commons”: state expansion weakens self-organization, state decline revives solidarity
- Mutualism’s three principles: solidaristic group, economic mechanism, long-term time horizon
- The “dropped baton” — loss of institutional knowledge transfer between generations
- Cosmopolis: translocal organization is not new — guilds, religions, and empires have always mixed territorial and non-territorial governance
- Entanglement as both source and consequence of mutualism — shared capital, identity systems, and mobility networks
- Cosmo-local financing: attracting floating capital toward regenerative community investment (70% local / 30% non-local)
- Network nations as additive layers rather than exit — filling gaps left by retreating states, not replacing them
- “Deep dives” as a method for cross-pollinating disconnected movements
- Low-hanging fruit: build mutualist infrastructure tools + create cross-movement gathering spaces