The Transition

Greedy little people in a sea of distress
Keep your more to receive your less
Unimpressed by material excess
Love is free, love me, say hell yes

Lucky me, swimmin' in my ability
Dancin' down on life with agility
Come and drink it up, from my fertility
Blessed with a bucket of lucky mobility

~ RHCP (Give It Away Now)

Yoga Element

Those of us who do creative work owe an extravagant debt to the people who came before us and paid an unbearable price. All we can do is make a good account of ourselves as we pay this inheritance forward—assuming custody of the things they fought for; making them secure utilities that balance our obligations to each other. We must stop making war with someone else's reality—because it's ours, too.

There's a harrowing scene at the start of Saving Private Ryan. Soldiers die in the hundreds as they come off landing craft. One of the few who makes it ashore lies on the beach, his core blown open; he deliberately collects his glistening entrails, struggling in particular with his intestines. As he stuffs one section in, another slips out; but he's diligent—as though packing his commuter gear, or his mobile office (laptop, phone, earbuds, wallet), before setting off for the train. He hopes to still be useful to his colleagues.

All people are like this unless resentment and alienation have already set in to preclude redemption.

We want to be of utility because it leads to belonging instead of alienation. For any group, discussion needs to be a mudra—a posture of openness that expresses equivalence, not equality, for we are not identical—if only because you are there and I am here, and that itself leads to a different perspective.

I revisited the scene many times; it played over and over in my mind for days. When you really take it onboard:

Yoga as a philosophy. It dwells on connectedness; the word shares its etymology with yoke. Yogasana creates openness and fluidity—blood flow, suppleness of tissue. Breath regulation matters because breath and awareness are linked. It is the one function that is either autonomous or deliberate—and in that reality sits the capacity to insert calm where panic or distress is, and from that adjustment create receptivity and openness.

Following breathwork comes contemplation: we integrate insights gathered from the world into a model. In that quietude, we apprehend what was lost in translation without even realizing it. We go back into the world transformed. Where we once responded with voice, we are quiet and listen—and acknowledge an idea without necessarily sharing it. We accept the data and take it home to adjust our own posture towards the world.

In the ethical traditions related to yoga, we call focused attention dharana (धारणा)—concentration—and when we bring our whole selves to a scene, it captivates us until we become immersed and one with it. This is why good storytelling matters: it can profoundly change us, but we have to bring ourselves to it. In much the same way, we are the main characters of our own narratives, writing the story of our lives with each interaction, as well as those of the NPCs we meet along the way and those close ones with whom we make and break it—bread—Baker Company—so earn it.

After dharana comes dhyana (meditation), then samadhi (absorption). Absorption is something else: the point at which the whole world looks at you with a new pair of eyes. You become the subject of the greatest non-compete contract of all time—the one you signed with creation and which lies beyond humanity. Let's take our practice beyond the warm, embracing community of our studio into the real world.

Off The Mat

Coming back to the film, a company must find and bring a soldier home. The last of four brothers—the other three, like our friend on the beach, have passed. In this quest, six of eight die. In purely utilitarian terms, it's a loss, but there is something more to life than numbers. Nothing says more about optimism than parenthood and the surrender of children by their family into the world of the sovereign. Ryan is the keeper of the flame—the one who carries the ember safely through wind and rain so that it may light another fire on a cold night.

Morale matters, and so too does loyalty. But if our institutions and their office-holders are to earn it, they must be transparent with their intentions. They must frame in the plainest terms that our problems stem from our collective inability to stem the debasement of capital—and that they stand ready to embrace the architecture required for a resilient transition. Humanity's survival depends upon it.

Meanwhile, the rest of us need to start caring about things. I think this is why soldiers struggle when they return to the banal and tedious reality of society after war: because the rest of us don't care about things—the inanimate and the non-sentient things we fight and die for. Genuine sacrifice—comrades who staked their lives for one another—juxtaposed against petty arguments over parking spaces and Black Friday deals makes the world look incoherent, bipolar, and insane even.

Because the small things that make the difference between life and death in one place—the sheltering tree, a pair of boots, a packet of biscuits—we casually waste in another. This is how I make sense of PTSD and depression among soldiers and other first responders.

Studying history and political economy, I’ve walked the academic road of historicism—tracing that long arc of progress toward human-centric governance without having gone to war. I haven't so much as held a real gun in my life.

Treasury of the Commons

We are in an age of turbulence and transformation, at the center of which is identity: how we present it on the social network and for what purpose—is it to be monetized, and if so, how and for whose benefit? We must prioritize our objectives carefully and without reference to frivolous concerns such as quarterly earnings and paid employment, never mind paid sick leave—this so that our social network may evolve and trust may be restored across the domains that make up our geopolitical and demographic realities. Protocol is how that trust becomes plumbing—attested identity and transparent yield flowing the same current, back and forth like breath at work, toward our common treasury and back to us so that we may invest with whatever purchase we get in life.

I'm not alone in seeing out on the horizon a vision of where we land. It is a tantalizing one of profound abundance. At the same time, here we are saddled with vessels in need of retrofit for the journey.

In the midst of a crisis, we preserve capital and manage risk. For institutions and sovereigns, that means hoarding cash and retaining critical talent while continuing to generate revenue. From the stakeholder point of view, it is the sensible thing.

At the microcosmic level of the individual, banks and other financial institutions get a good read on our credibility and risk. Financial data is broadly available and aggregated to create the number we're signaled by the likes of Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion.

For us as individuals, generating income means presenting our capabilities with clarity so that we are matched against opportunities. It's natural too that we want to make the best impression on our resumes—skeuomorphic outdated tools that do little to really elaborate to people who we really are.

Employers in return are swamped with thousands of near-identical, unverified resumes that obscure true potential and make hiring a high-risk gamble for both sides. What if we replaced keyword optimization with cryptographically attested proof of work? An open-source AI operating within a framework of domain and sovereign trust could take a Job Description and return a curated shortlist of five or six top candidates, matched on verified skill quality, price alignment, and authentic online output—assuming they have a repository of applications and original content on-chain as a semantic perimeter: a transparent representation of who they are.

Within an institution as well, leaders responsible to a company's shareholders for its management constantly need to track how yield is generated and how it flows from product teams and divisions up towards corporate treasury while salaries flow the other way. Whether they are in balance; whether there is a reasonable surplus; whether the enterprise is an exciting place to work, evidenced by that yield which always correlates to a sense of purpose and creativity; whether the yield is steady or fluctuates—and if so, why.

The transparency with which this data is presented leads to actionable insights to better navigate people through their work journey.

The government too needs a portion of this revenue in its ledgers—preferably as a constant stream rather than in quarterly fits and starts—to fund its own obligations. The currency would flow from corporate treasuries at financial institutions into revenue agencies and regulatory bodies, providing the information required to properly deliver and execute data-oriented monetary and fiscal policy.

At the heart of the Dollar Regime is the Federal Reserve. We must examine how much each regime commits to that semantic perimeter, and how we then might reconfigure the International Monetary Fund and World Bank into credible and truly global institutions that balance regional interests and the need to sustain and enhance prosperity while tackling the daily litany of disaster that is our escalating climate crisis.

These sound like mundane concerns but time and again it is money and materiel for which we have spilled blood. Those of us who know why we are in crypto understand too how it may address age-old concerns for security, poverty, and war.

Omphalos

The West African myth of Edshu is instructive in our argumentative times. As the personification of the Axis Mundi—the World Navel fountainhead of all creative force—he embodies dynamic perspective. Like Shiva with his lingam he stirs transformation.

To teach two lifelong friends the danger of blind certainty, Edshu walked between their fields wearing a hat that was red on one side, white on the other, green at the front, and black at the back. When the men turned their harmony into a violent brawl over the stranger's true appearance, Edshu returned to reveal the hat in full—proving that both farmers were entirely right from where they stood, yet completely wrong in mistaking a single point of view for absolute truth. The two saw what had come before them well enough to live together—black. Their children may scoff at their arguments and fashions, calling their times green. Lens and perspective are important. The more we have, the better our modeling of reality as it walks the path into the horizon that is time.

We may handle the butterfly effect of the ensuing crisis and its chaos, but those in governance at sovereign and corporate institutions need to get to grips with how protocols secure our global asset infrastructure as one thing—that orb which astronauts saw that forever changed how they model reality. The Transition is in sight: less noise, more custody, time priced as though we care about what we do.