✨ Become a founding member to access my online courses, including Jurassic Worlding and How To Live In The Future
✨ Browse and buy the books we mention on the show at Bookshop.org
✨ Stream and download my music at artist-owned (!) Subvert.fm
✨ Learn about Atlas Research Group, my new team building sovereign infrastructure for social coherence and collective intelligence
In the last episode, my conversation with C. Thi Nguyen explored “value capture”: his term for what happens when our scoring systems define what we care about and ultimately our identities. In this episode, we ask what it means to reverse this process — what you might call “value emancipation” — with Andrea Farias (LinkedIn), a Barcelona-based researcher and builder whose guiding mission to is to support the transition to a regenerative civilization aligned with the flows of our planet.
Andrea investigates how digital technologies can accelerate this transition, crafting information ecosystems that reimagine knowledge creation and resource allocation. But her path to this life required some serious unlearning and a rocky road out of her prior incarnation as a healthcare tech product strategist.
We invite you to ask the same questions she did, and which we ask in this converstion:
• When I decouple from the desires I’ve identified with, what is worth taking their place?• How do we design and adopt technologies from this new, more spacious identity?• How does the local determination of plural value help us restore necessary context to human-scale decision-making?• How do we navigate the tensions between the place-ful realm of community and the placeless realm of global coordination?• Where do we need friction in our digital lives, and how can ecology and bioregionalism inspire visions for a better Web?• What does it mean to be “local to an idea or a narrative” and how does that cyber-locality interface with geographic locality?• Where do we still want abstraction for coordination at scale?
Tune in for a deep dialogue on how to care for the processes that actually create life — and what it means to enact regenerative principles to personal and collective health, technology and economy.
(Fun fact: although she wasn’t at the time of this recording, Andrea is now a member of Atlas Research Group! So we will definitely be doing more together…)
Special Announcement
Join me at the Weirdosphere online learning platform for “Transcendence in the Age of AI” — where we’re hosting an interactive screening of Steven Spielberg’s A.I. (2001) on June 23rd and chasing it on June 25th with a deep-cut conversation between myself and two wonderful writers and film-makers: Weird Studies co-host JF Martel and Joel Gunz of Macguffin Media. Fresh ideas guaranteed! The viewing party is free to all; the follow-up dialogue and group discussion is $20 USD.
Register here. Founding Members on Substack and Patreon can join for free, as always! Reach out if you are one and would like the free registration link.
Chapters
00:00 Replacing Habits With Values01:47 Introduction05:39 Job Creation vs. Job Destruction08:04 Enoughness & Bigger Desires Than “More”11:00 Andrea’s Story of Crisis & Transformation23:04 Limits, Care, & Post-Growth30:44 Bioregionalism, Currency, And Web340:40 Tokenization Tradeoffs42:09 Governance Starts Local44:42 Rewilding Digital Biomes49:42 The Fractal Cozy Web55:29 AI Translation And Legibility01:04:48 Bioregional Finance Experiments01:11:16 Protocols, Enforcement, & Values01:25:18 Closing & Thanks
Mentions
Andrea’s Website (which may not work; she’s extremely busy doing real stuff)
Andrea’s Substack (which is fallow due to aforementioned real stuff but maybe a surge of new followers will inspire her to publish more of her excellent writing here)
Kate Raworth - Doughnut EconomicsJack D. Forbes - Indigenous Spirituality & EthosYancey Strickler - Postcapitalism for RealistsThe Consilience Project - Technology is Not Values Neutral: Ending the Reign of Nihilistic DesignHenry’s Zoo - The Limits and “Good” of Public GoodsJames Bridle - Ways of Being
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit michaelgarfield.substack.com/subscribe
