Beyond Hierarchies: Collective Intelligence at Scale
Jean-François Noubel, visionary thinker and researcher in the field of collective intelligence, explains that for collective intelligence to truly scale, we must both see and be seen. Like in a jazz band, where every player senses the whole to improvise in harmony, societies also need a reciprocal view of the whole—only on a much larger scale.Known for his work on how humanity can evolve beyond ego-centered systems, Jean-François explores how narratives, language, and invisible architectures shape the way we organize ourselves, and how emerging technologies can help us transcend the limitations of pyramidal power structures.In this conversation, he shares stories and insights that reveal how myths, grammar, and currencies act as the social DNA of our systems—and why re-designing them may be essential for humanity’s next evolutionary step.Watch this episode on YouTubeListen to this episode:Apple PodcastsSpotifyPocket CastsRSS FeedThemes:The Power of Stories and Myths – How narratives guide consciousness and collective action.Paradigms and Unstated Assumptions – The invisible beliefs that shape our systems and behaviors.Language as Invisible Architecture – How grammar and words embed domination and possibility.The Middleman and Pyramidal Systems – Why concentration of power creates fragility.Distributed Technologies – Designing resilient, living systems for the future.TimestampsOpening & Framing00:00 — Collective intelligence in small groups vs pyramidal systems01:43 — Sponsor: Holochain Foundation & Lucas’ personal journey02:59 — Introducing Jean-François Noubel & his visionStories & Narratives04:53 — Why stories and myths are the strongest forces in human evolution07:16 — Narratives as holograms of culture and consciousness08:12 — Paradigms and Donella Meadows’ “Leverage Points”Paradigms & Assumptions09:58 — Hidden cultural assumptions: gender, slavery, eating animals12:18 — Invisible architectures: language, currency, time, and codes14:38 — Challenging assumptions: veganism, language, and thingificationLanguage & Grammar16:56 — Patriarchy embedded in grammar18:46 — Removing the verb to be and reducing “social violence”21:11 — Language as domination vs language as responsibility22:17 — Causality vs synchronicity: why our languages limit perceptionTechnology & Evolution24:04 — Written language and centralization of power26:17 — From oral to pyramidal systems: writing as keystone technology28:43 — Scarcity currencies and concentration of power32:23 — The role of the middleman (agents, rules, data)34:44 — Why bureaucracies grow and become self-servingDisintermediation36:36 — Concentration of money and power: systemic feedback loops38:33 — Limits of the middleman and blockchain’s shortcomings40:16 — Distributed living systems and decision-making43:31 — Pyramidal bottlenecks vs distributed resilience45:07 — Humanity’s evolutionary need for distributed intelligence47:32 — New grammars for synchronicity and emergenceCurrencies & Agreements49:29 — Meta-grammar for agreements51:22 — Designing currencies as living stories52:59 — How the Holochain story has evolved over the yearsAI & Holopticism55:20 — Artificial intelligence as augmented collective intelligence57:20 — Wrapping up: Holopticism as sensing the whole togetherClosing58:10 — Outro & invitation to subscribeResources and References📖 A Brief History of Everything – Ken Wilber📜 Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System – Donella Meadows📜 Towards a Commons Culture – Paul Krafel🏆 Elinor Ostrom’s Nobel Prize work on Design Principles for the CommonsTranscriptJean-François Noubel (00:00.322)From a collective intelligence perspective, the best setting as human beings, we do play sports in small teams. The jazz bands, we start as a small group and the family. So we have a cognitive system optimized for small groups. But it has limitations. When you want to do big things, it can't work. You need to unite more people. So we shifted to pyramidal collective intelligence.It has centralized power, chain of command, labor division, and a scarce currency. Because the scarcity of currency will create the concentration of power. One of the properties that we like in small groups, we call it holopticism. A holos, a hole, and opticism, see the hole. And so I know what I can do in my sports team or in my jazz band becauseI have a representation of the whole. I know what the whole does, so I know what actions I can do in the whole. Every time you have a pyramidal structure, you let a minority of people to deal with something so big, they can't embrace the complexity. If you don't give them augmented holopticism, which distributed systems will need to provide, then they can't work. You hitthe glass wall.Lucas Tauil (01:43.48)This episode is brought to you by the Holochain Foundation. Holochain is creating technology that allows people to team up, share information and solve their own problems without needing a middleman. Creating carriers that cannot be captured, Holochain enables privacy and holds space for innovation and mutuality. I first came across the project in 2018.During my journey into participative culture with Unsparil, my good friend Hailey Cooperider pointed me to the green paper and I was blown away by the vision of a local first decentralized internet. I worked for five years on the project and feel very grateful for the support with the show. Enjoy it.Lucas Tauil (02:59.79)Today we welcome Jean-Francois Nouvelle, a visionary thinker, speaker and pioneer in the realm of collective intelligence. Jean-Francois has dedicated his research to understanding how humans can evolve from ego-centered systems to new forms of collaboration that honor our interconnectedness. With a background in computer science, linguistics and philosophy,Jean-Francois has worked at the cutting edge of technology and humanity. He explores how we can transcend the limitations of current societal structures, embracing what he calls the next species of humanity. From his deep insights into money and currency systems to his practical experiments in living systems, Jean-Francois invites us to reimagine how we live, work,and create together. So get ready to expand your perspective and dive into a fascinating conversation about the future of collective intelligence, the role of inner transformation in the art of designing systems that truly work for all. Welcome, Jean-Francois. It's an honor to have you with us.Nice to meet you, Lucas. Thank you so much for having me here.Lucas TauilI'm stoked to dive into this conversation. I would like to start with narratives. The materialists say we are made of atoms. I prefer to believe we are made of stories, relationships to place, life and people. You also seem fascinated by narratives. What is the story we need to reveal about the stories we are telling ourselves?Jean-François Noubel (04:53.592)Well, first, I don't see a bigger driving force than stories. And I'd rather even say myth, not as a mythology like old stories, but myth as those kind of stories that invite us to a greater journey and to overcome our limitations and to do something so, so big and so cool and so impossible that we want to do it. You know, like really going to the moon, going to space, and building, you know, the best journey, the best experience we can build for ourselves. That means dreaming something that does not exist. So not just storytelling. Now, we do exist as storytellers. We've existed as this forever since we speak together. 50,000 years ago, you had human beings around the fire sharing stories. So we do exist as storytellers, as storytelling beings. Yeah, no bigger force than this. Now we have different levels of stories. Those stories we say every day, what did you do today? And that will reflect how you see the world, you see yourself, your value system. Every story that we share reflects that. We're like a hologram of a greater thing and the hologram of yourself, but also a hologram of the society and the stories you believe in that you belong to. And you have also other stories that have the mythological aspect of that. When they share something about an epic adventure, you know, let's do something epic together like:Take a boat and go over the globe together, you know, explore new frontiers of science, make the most beautiful movie ever. You know, something so incredible that it brings, you know, tears in your eyes when you speak about it. And it also unites people around this because whatever you do, you know, let's talk about space exploration. You have people who do coding, you have people who do accounting, you have people who train as astronauts. You have all sorts of people that if you ask them, what they do, their story will say something greater, will connect their being into something greater with a sense of belonging and participating to something greater. So here we talk about the myth. And of course you cannot separate the everyday stories and the myth. They have some kind of entanglement. But understanding how this works, I think, give us very powerful insights aboutJean-François Noubel (07:16.566)social dynamics and also maybe understanding where the world wants to go, where consciousness wants to go.Lucas TauilThis gets me to Ken Wilber's A Brief History of Everything. We understand evolution where survival of the fittest work. Yeah, that explains how legs evolved. But it doesn't explain how you evolved from an arm to wings. You need a hundred plus consecutive mutations for an arm to become a wing. And you need two individuals to have viable offspring. how this happens. And I'm with you. I feel this space of wonder is more likely to have answers than the subatomic particles in the Large Hadron Collider.Lucas Tauil (08:12.79)Jean-Francois, in your research you mention unstated assumptions that are deeply ingrained in our culture. In Paul Krafel’s recent article, Towards a Common Culture, introduced me to the work of systems thinker, Donela Meadows. In her article, Leverage Points, she points to the most impactful ways to shift systems. And one of the leverage points are paradigms.She describes paradigms as the shared ideas in the minds of society, the great big unstated assumptions. In her words, unstated because, unnecessary to state, everyone already knows them. Money measures something real and has real meaning. Therefore, people who are paid less are literally worthless. Growth is good. Nature is a stock of resources to become...converted to human purpose. And there it goes, you know, one can own land. Evolution stopped with the emergence of Homo sapiens. Those are just a few of the paradigmatic assumptions of our culture, all of which have then founded other cultures. So, if paradigms are the sources of systems, from them, shared social agreements, system flows, feedback, stocks, everythingabout systems is based on them. And her insight is so powerful because these shared beliefs are where real power lies when changing systems. What assumptions are we taking for granted? And what might be possible if we change them?Jean-François Noubel (09:58.518)What a topic, what a big topic. We have so many assumptions and many of them rooted in stories we share. So for instance, we've shared stories that women don't have the same level of intelligence than men for thousands of years. And today, a majority of people consider that slaughtering animals represents a very natural order, just like people of color in slavery belong to the natural order. I think the next generations will talk about civilizations today with some kind of like, wow, they ate animals. But I think we need even to go further in the very deep structures of language. Whatever language you speak has some forms of consciousness rooted in them, you know, with layers and layers of thousands of years of different forms of supremacy. And so the supremacy consciousness that we can see everywhere, whether you call it racism, sexism, homophobia, religious orthodoxy, all these things, you can also find them in the very roots of the grammars that we speak today. That's why I think we can't invent brand new languages out of sort of the blue like this, but we can hack. We can hack our stories and build new stories, but we can also hack our languages. I can help you share some examples that I've done for myself, because I...Before talking on a general theoretical level, I like to try things on myself first to see how they work. I try to work on new stories and see how they make me regress or evolve. And also I try to change things in my language structures and my social codes and, you know, every possible aspect where I can see where my consciousness goes. And by the way, I think maybe the underlying thing when we talk about evolution, you know, when I say the word evolution, most people will see biological evolution, you know, how we move from dinosaurs to today's forms of life. But I think we need to talk about the evolution of consciousness, which includes a biological evolution, which includes the materialistic way to look at reality, but not only. And so back to living systems and human living systems with storytelling. Yes, we have the storytellings, but we have also invisible architectures like the currency system that we use.Jean-François Noubel (12:18.796)The way you design a currency system, can see that social DNA, that means the social body that will emerge from that will depend, will change based on how you play with those currency systems. The way we articulate grammars in the way we speak or write will also completely shift the kind of consciousness that we have. And of course the biological aspect of it as well, you know, I can put chemicals in your body or I can change your DNA and that can also, because of design, create new kinds of society and new kinds of human beings or post human beings as well. So maybe we want to talk about all these things under the umbrella of design and what I'll call invisible architectures because we don't see them physically, know, currency design, you don't see it. Language structures, you don't see them. You can observe them, but you don't see them like seeing a bird or a tree outside your window. Social codes, you don't see them. The deep structures of narratives and stories that we share, you don't see them. The way we experience time, you don't see it, but we could also shift the way we experience time. So you see all these things, I put them under the umbrella of invisible architectures and how do we become architects for emergence. And we could cover any of these topics, of course, if you're interested in them, through practical examples, theoretical examples as well.Lucas TauilYeah, I'm particularly interested in the unstated assumptions in how they create those systems you're describing. On a fundamental level, there is this body of old ways of doing things that we don't even question or are aware of. It is in the realm of shadow.Jean-François NoubelWell, so assumptions we can take plenty of them and I gave two examples. As a vegan person, I've really challenged that assumption that we need to take the life of other animals. Well, probably not a long time ago when you lived in a tribe but with eight billion people on this planet interconnected and having the capacity to grow food other than animals, why would we keep hurting sentient beings, ruin the planet and create all these toxic effects that we have on the planet?Jean-François Noubel (14:38.008)Here we have one assumption, but who really works on this assumption? A tiny minority of people. Most people will try to capture carbon without challenging the root hidden assumptions that we need to eat animals. And so we could challenge so many assumptions. However, I also feel quite interested in seeing what we have rooted in the very grammars that we use.So let me take a few examples to see the depth of what we need to address. For instance, when I pronounce the word resource, when I declare something a resource, I've put that word on that something. Then I've shifted my relationship to that something in declaring that a resource. So I can say human resources. I can talk about the things out there in the world as resources. So you can't see it as just a word. It declares something.It changes the rules of relationships and the behaviors that we have with that something or that being. Same thing with what we call thingification. When I say the word meat, well, then I have thingified being. When I say meat, I transform into a thing and into a resource. I kind of kill the whole array of dimensionalities of that being, you know, that being had a life, had a personality, had a story, had siblings, friends, issues, you know, a whole sense of self, and then the persons also who raised that being and who killed that being also have their own story. So you have a whole web of experiences, human and non-human experiences, that you just kill right now by declaring meat. You've thingified. So you have something rooted in language.Thingification. Okay? We have these processes rooted in language of domination that we use all the time. Also in many languages and that includes of course your native language and that we have in so many Latin languages that we speak. We don't have a neutral person. We don't have the it. So the masculine becomes the norm and the feminine the exception. And that has also impact on your brain. So if you want a patriarchalJean-François Noubel (16:56.674)world, patriarchy has created those kind of grammars that kind of self-justifies the domination from the masculine side over the feminine. And we can go even further. I've changed something quite important in my language, in both English and French, suppressed a word I don't know if you've noticed, but I've really taken a word away from my language. Have you noticed that?Not not yet,Well, usually people don't notice that. I don't use the verb to be. And I haven't used it since we began our conversation. Every time I say, and I will use it on purpose, I say, you know, this person is like this. The Americans, the women, the Europeans are this or not this. Then, or reality is like this. The is-ness of things. I impose.Some kind of absolute truth and absolute reality that has nothing to do with your perception or mine. It just is like this. So let me take an example. When I say, Ken is shy. You don't have a choice. He is shy, forever. It has nothing to do with you or me. It has an is-ness of it in the absolute reality. So I create a kind ofrelationship with reality with the Isness that has nothing to do with the observer. Now if you hear me say, I met Kevin yesterday, I found him shy. Or if you hear me say, begin my sentences with, I believe, I think that, I have the feeling that, all these things starting with I as the observer or as the creator of my own experience, then I don't apply this social violence onto you because I just tell you,Jean-François Noubel (18:46.57)I see the world from this window, from my emotions, from my storytelling, from my way of thinking, from where I observe things. And you may see that from a different perspective. So you see, moving from things are this way, where I impose a social violence all the time on you, and also I create a narrative on myself where I don't even see myself as the creator of my experience.But moving from that to saying, I think that, I believe tha.t I have the opinion that, I have the experience that. Then I create a narrative for myself first where I grow and become more of an adult who takes responsibility for how I see the world, how I experience the world and offer that to you. And you may have a different way to observe the world as well. And we don't need to fight. We may want to add our perspectives areSo you see, removing the verb to be has helped me to shift, I think, to greater embrace of reality with less violence in my everyday language. And now seeing the world from that perspective, when I see people say to be all the time, most sentences have the word to be in them. Things are all the time or are not. Well, I see the everyday violence and domination at play.It might look okay for a casual conversation. Let's say we go to the movie together and you say, this movie was great. And I say, ah, this movie was awful. We won't kill each other. We may argue a little bit. Right? And let's go have a beer. But look at the conflicts in the world. The things that are good and are not good, that are right and are wrong, that are true and are not true. The isness of things leads to most conflicts that you'll see in your everyday life, but also in the big, you know, conflicts in the world. So not only I believe we need to evolve our storytellings, we also need to go to a deep scrutiny of our grammars, because a grammar can also embed lots of domination, alienation, supremacy that we can observe in our everyday language.Jean-François Noubel (21:11.82)And I don't pretend that I've removed all those things from my language because I still need to use those things every day. But what can I do today to redesign those architectures in my social codes, in my language, in the way I use technology, and the way I use currencies, and all those things? And then we have great leverages that we can use.Lucas TauilSo in the work narratives doing cultures, there's an underlying layer where grammar is playing in narratives.Jean-François NoubelYes, absolutely.Lucas TauilAnd how do grandmas and narratives work in cultures? So what is it that they build?Jean-François NoubelWell, I don't know all the languages, if I think of the languages that I know, they talk about causal reality. So you have a subject, a verb, and a target. Like the dog sees the cat, the dog runs after the cat, the cat climbs in the tree. So we have a very causal language.Jean-François Noubel (22:17.774)which we can modulate of course with you know slow, slowly, fast, with joy, with all these things but mostly we have things that talk about causal events a cause and an effect and does reality always work with causes and effects?I don't think so. think causal effects do happen in reality, but reality probably has much more than just causal things. But our languages cannot address that part of reality that we can experience in our consciousness, in our intimate life. For instance, you know, the doing the experience of synchronicities where that event A and that event B, they have a meaning to you as the observer, as you experiencing those events.And they have a special meaning, special storytelling, but none of these events exist as the cause of the other. Like you think, you know, of this friend, you haven't met this friend for the past 20 years, and then suddenly you bump into that person in the street, or that person gives you a call. And one minute earlier you thought about this person, and you haven't met that person for such a long time, then you have a synchronicity. Now you cannot say, you're thinking, provoked the call. But in our language, we cannot express synchronicities other than in a causal way. So, at least not just a philosophical question, because when we think about systems, have emergence. Like new properties emerge from a system, and causality cannot explain them. The grammars that we use cannot reflect this new level of consciousness that we may have inside ourselves. It cannot bring that to a social reality that we can share.So maybe we also need to evolve those grammars as well.Lucas Tauil (24:04.174)It's very interesting because for a very long time grammars existed in the realm of spoken languages, right? We have seen the emergence of the Greek alphabet and technologies around language have hugely transformed how we experience the planet, right? Once written language was around, huge geopolitical transformations emerged from that. It createdhuge centralization. The Catholic Church emerges on the back of the written language, right? The evolution of the Greek alphabet, hordes of monks copying the Bible and spreading it around the planet. That is the book where people learn how to read and write. But this same centralization increased literacy and people started reading other things and questioning.So the very centralization carries its mirror image, right? Its decentralization. And then there's the printing press and huge concentration of power from telling stories with the printing press. Stories are cheap, many people are reading, people start having opinions, and again, it carries its own decentralization. And we go on, like the Telegraph.the internet and now we are in this space of distributed technology, right? We encounter this way of getting together, connecting our computers and doing things. What is the story rooted in this distributed technology? What is hidden in there?Jean-François NoubelWell, you can see in the examples that you gave, you know, the writing where you just had an elite that could read and write and had also access to the means, the technology. Not everyone had access to paper and not everyone had access to the tool that you use to put a sign on the support. So we always have the same pattern where few innovate and because they know they have the control, not necessarily with bad intention. I don't know. I don't have the answer about the everyone-ness.Jean-François Noubel (26:17.944)However, we can clearly see an evolution from centralized to distributed. From a collective intelligence perspective, we started in what we call original collective intelligence. That means the small group, the tribe, human beings. do play sports in small teams, jazz bands, a startup. We started as a small group and a family. So we have a biology and a cognitive system optimized for small groups. But of course it has limitations. And one of the big properties that we like so much in small groups, we call it whole-opticism. A whole is a whole and opticism see the whole. And so I know what I can do in my sports team or in my jazz band because I have a representation of the whole. I know what the whole does so I can know what actions I can do in the whole. And we can come back to this notion later, butRemember original collective intelligence. That has limitations because when you want to do big things, it can't work. You need to unite more people. And so we had that evolution and we shifted to pyramidal collective intelligence, which still prevails today. You have to think of, you know, moving from nomadic tribes to people who stayed at the same place, sedentary lifestyle, agriculture.An explosion of complexity, explosion of birth rate increases, you need to specialize, have more specialized jobs, you need to administrate bigger territories. All world traditions cannot cope with this level of complexity. And then you have this miraculous technology, the kind of internet of the time, called the writing. That comes because now you can transport information through space and time. which you cannot really do that much with an oral tradition. So that really brought the keystone technology for pyramidal structures to emerge. And we still live by those standards today. It has centralized power, it has chain of command, labor division, and one very important, harder to understand, a scarce currency. Because the scarcity of currency will create theJean-François Noubel (28:43.544)concentration of power. If you want concentration of power, make a scarce currency. It will mutually reinforce itself.Lucas TauilJF, I remember reading that written language emerges from accounting, and that accounting emerges from agriculture preservation of grain, so that it is in coaches where grain became feasible, that the staple that you can stalk and survive droughts and sieges where mathematics and accounting emerges in the language. And with it,a scarcity currency, is this a correct connection of the two things?Jean-François NoubelYes, very likely written language came from accounting. You need to represent big quantities, you need to memorize data, you need to write in stone, if I may say so, a contract, an agreement, because verbal agreement doesn't bring a memory. So you can create an independent support on which you can see, well, I owe you this amount of work or cattle. So yes, very likely it began with this.And so writing currencies and writing abstract language that led to philosophy and poetry, all the abstract language, they probably have the same origin, the same root, and then they took their own course and specialization. And then it led to specialized forms of language. Engineering language, have medical language, and accounting means that some people needed to specialize into this, just like we have quoters today. The quoters of the time, they knew how to read and...Jean-François Noubel (30:24.462)how to read and write and how to deal with those complex grammars because it complexifies very, very quickly, you know? How do you define time? You know, do I owe you something next week in 10 years? How do you describe those items of the I owe you or you owe me things? How do you create abstractions about agreements that we have to rule the city together, you know, on the territory together? How do you define the laws that we agree on and then how do you write those stories also because then you have to have to write stories just for the sake of remembering things or creating a legal system you know like you have a legal system and then you didn't play by the rules then you have a story to share and to write to write down and all those things so it very quickly complexifies and with lots and lots of abstractions and things that don't have a physical existence per se they have an existence in our mind in the way we tell a story. Like if I say, you know, you owe me 10 hours of work, it doesn't have a physical existence.And there's something really interesting in this scarcity rooted story, right? Everything is intermediated. Everything has to go through this central power. And we're finally getting to technological possibilities where we can have this intermediation. What emerges from this intermediation?But maybe first, before we go into this intermediation, maybe we need to understand a little more about intermediation because it really brings something so important here. And that we call the middleman. The middleman has the role of guaranteeing always, all the time, three things. And it doesn't matter which period of time you look at it, 10,000 years ago or today.Jean-François Noubel (32:23.01)You'll see those three things happening all the time. You have players or identities. So did person A have a contract with person B or does person A owe that amount of livestock or work to person B? So you need, have technically what we call players or agents. I prefer the word agent, kind of more neutral. The middleman takes care of agents, the identity of agents. So whether we do banking, carpooling, chess contests, you have players, have agents interacting with one another and you need to know which agent did what to with that other agent. Second, we play games, we play rules. So do we play chess? Do we play elections? Do we play money transfer? Do we play carpooling? Do we play medical advice or medical acts? You play games.Different games with different rules. The middleman also needs to guarantee that you play by the game. Like, you know, did you do the right medical act in the whole medical world? Did you play the right chess move if we play chess? Did you rent an apartment to me or a car? All those things. So did we play by the rules? And third thing, the data. We update data all the time.What amount of money do you have on your bank account? Which ride did you give me on this carpooling system? The middleman guarantees those records of agents, rules and data in a good space that you will play by the rules, right agents and yet that you have a right data updated over time. Whatever you want to do, know, rule a country or play a contest or do banking or do Airbnb.You need the middleman. We never knew how to do differently than that, but it has some consequences. Number one, you as a middleman, if you want to do your job in a good way, you need always more and more information and control. You have this kind of natural drive. I need more data because I want to do my job well. I need more people. I need more control. It can grow and grow and grow and create what we call bureaucracies or those kind of bigJean-François Noubel (34:44.449)cancer, you know, when it becomes so big that it has, it lives just for itself. Now it becomes its own self-interest. And just because of a natural drive, let's even forget about, you know, people who want to make personal profit of that. Just if they want to do a job in the right way, they will take this direction.Lucas TauilIt's a beautiful acknowledgement that all power becomes self-serving. Even if it starts really well intended with a revolution chopping the heads of the nobility, it becomes self-serving. It's the nature of it, right?Jean-François NoubelExactly. And if you look at all the bureaucracies in the world, you can see that kind of story. Now they become self-serving and they need to justify their work. But, of course, it also gives you lot of power. I mean, that makes it so hard to resist because it will give you advantages. And of course, as an elected person, you want to vote the laws that will serve you better than other people that you don't even know.So the middle man has a very strong efficiency but a very poor resilience. Good efficiency, poor resilience. Because if you attack it, if you intoxicate it, if you corrupt it, if you hack it, then the whole system will collapse. And when you look at history, you know how the whole course of humankind changed brutally because of a tiny thing on the head, you know? Think of a chump assassination attempt.It didn't work by one tiny little move of the shooter that could have changed the course of the world. And you have this concentration of power, see? So much connected to a tiny variation, further effect at this moment. And we could say the same thing for the assassination of Kennedy.Lucas Tauil (36:36.174)What would have happened had Kennedy not died, right? Exactly. And you can see. have never had autocracies in South America, in Egypt, Somalia. He would probably have held his opposition to autocratic capitalism regimes, right? That became the norm after he died.Jean-François Noubel (36:58.306)Exactly.Same thing with the First World War. Also, every time you look at history, you can see the link between the feather effect and the concentration of power. So the middleman existed because of evolutionary advantages. It allowed to do big things with big numbers of people in a pyramidal way. But now we hit the limits of that. We've never seen so much concentration of power that has nothing to do with democracy.Lucas TauilWe've never seen such a concentration of money because it goes along together. Concentration of money creates concentration of power that creates concentration of money that creates concentration of power and so on.Jean-François NoubelAbsolutely, kind of positive feedback loop. So I don't even need to talk about it from a moral perspective, but from a system design's perspective, it has reached its limits. Thank you. Bye bye. Let's now move to the next step. Now we know how to put the middleman into the whole system. So the whole system becomes its own middleman. And Holochain, the big story about Holochain, it did that. And it began with the blockchain saying, we could do with some accounting, with tokens in a very limited way, energy consuming way. It worked a little bit like the first plane of the Wright brothers. You know, it showed we can take off. Okay. Now, do you want to put your ass in that kind of plane and out it? I do not want to put my ass in the blockchain technology as big as it may become. don't, it doesn't do what we need to do today. It doesn't.Jean-François Noubel (38:33.048)fulfill the whole requirements of living systems, of distributed living systems that we need today. Holochain does that. So from a bigger perspective, you see, it resolves this limitation of the middleman because the whole system now can become the middleman, or part of it. It doesn't say that it has necessarily become that all the time. Sometimes we need a middleman. I don't say we don't need middlemans anymore. But we need to know the limitations of that. And we need to know that now we have a choice.Lucas TauilSo how is Holochain able to deliver disintermediation? What is it that it does that delivers disintermediation?Jean-François NoubelYes, it takes away the middle man. I would say everyone can become an intermediate. I'd rather put it this way, it really distributes in the system the intermediation and does not concentrate that in the hands of the few. So that makes the system much more resilient, of course, without taking the efficiency of that. Now, I would like to invite you to make this hard exercise to think like what if our species now becomes able to build distributed organizations that means that we can build societies and collectives that don't have a concentration of power in them. That means, and I mean not just how language works, know, like languages they evolve in a distributed way already. They don't have, they have very little intermediation.But what if we could do that for everyday decisions? Like what happens in your body. You don't need to think about what your thyroid does. You don't need to...Jean-François Noubel (40:16.936)understand what your bladder does or your liver do. You have so many automated flows. I see that in the future where lots of things will self-regulate in a distributed way. Now for building organizations, whether you want to create a new technology or to organize your territory, then we need to make decisions together and think, explore those possibilities where you know that everyone can participate.and it doesn't need a centralized power. What does that mean? We have so much not seen that. It seems so abstract. You know, when I give talks, people keep asking me, yes, but who will decide? Well, maybe decisions will emerge without us even knowing who decided. You know, they just emerged. Histories emerged.Lucas TauilThere are design patterns for that, like Eleanor Ostrom won a Nobel of Economics identifying the design patterns for managing the commons, for deciding together. Who's in the membrane, what are the agreements, how often you take the agreements, how is the punishment, how it increases. So it's not that there isn't knowledge around this. We not only have the technological bits and bobs, but we have the social understanding as well, right?Jean-François NoubelYes, absolutely. So you see, we talked about language and notice how we shift from a very mechanical language that we had so far in the past into a more biological language. You know, we talk about living systems, we talk about language, we talk about social DNA. Those organizations have much more aliveness than the kind of mechanical command and control.You need a mechanical dialectics when you do pyramidal things because chains of command need to work in a very mechanical way. Otherwise, how could they work? They also need to have domesticated people because chains of command work with predictable people. Whatever you think, whatever emotions you have, whatever your personal story, up to certain degree, of course, but this next Monday at eight, you will...go to your work. And you have a long training to separate your inner being, which you hardly know, with your outer doing, for which you have such a long training. went through long years of studies to learn how to do things and to annihilate your inner self. Everyone needs to learn the same stories, to repeat them in the same way, and don't go too far in challenging those stories because you'll have trouble.And I may come back to that later, by the way, of the importance of that challenging the mainstream stories. But you see, the pyramidal collective intelligence world in which we still live today is still highly dominant, but hitting the limits, the hard limits everywhere, everywhere. Every time you have a pyramidal structure, you let a minority of people to deal with something so big that they can't embrace the complexity.Jean-François Noubel (43:31.072)No fucking way they can do that. By design. Even if you have, you know, well-trained people, good intention, not corrupted, not interested in big money and all those things.Lucas TauilIt's a matter of surface area, right?Jean-François NoubelAbsolutely, very poor surface area. So they will always become the bottleneck for a system that needs to make decisions everywhere. If you don't recruit all the agents in the decision-making process, in the action-making process, if you don't give them augmented holopticism, which distributed systems will need to provide, then, you know, they can't work. They just hit the wall now.Hence why we have an evolutionary need, not just a political philosophy here, but life needs to evolve this way. Our species needs to evolve this way, otherwise it can't make it. No more than all world tribal traditions could make it to face the complexity of the world that grew up in front of them, that they had created themselves.And now they needed, you know, another technology and another paradigm. And you can't ask that dude in the tribal world who grew up in oral traditions to understand what the writing and centralization of power would do and create civilizations. No way that person could anticipate the shift of reality that would happen in the next hundreds of years because the person didn't even have the grammars.Jean-François Noubel (45:07.31)to talk about this reality. And today we face the very same limitation, like we've always evolved in the pyramidal world with the grammars of domination that you need in the pyramidal world. But now we need to make it a distributed world, but we don't have even the grammars for the everyday language and sharing their reality. So I feel myself exactly like the tribal man or woman starting to see, well, something bigger may emerge.And the writing does that thing, but I can't really see because I don't have the grammars to talk about it, to represent, to have a social representation, to have story sharing about this. So now we face this exact same challenge, but we have to do it in a matter of years, maybe a couple of generations, no more. So what a challenge. We need distributed technology because now...You can become yourself, I can become myself, everyone can become themselves as a unique agent, as a combination of so many unique things. You told me before in our previous conversations how much you love sailing and you've done journalism and so many other things and you've raised children in a specific way, you've created a school. All of us, have this kind of unique patchwork of so many things that we do. How do you want this to fit in the pyramidal structure?And how do you want to build a society with so much unique profiles if you want to create that in a different way than pyramidal? We need to deal with complexity and we need to deal with emergence. That means we need to deal with living systems. And those technologies, those infrastructures, they just arrived. They just began. Now we can allow ourselves to think of new social organisms.And that means the story-tellings will look very, very different. The same kind of difference between the narratives of a tribal person versus a civilization person. But also the grammars that we use, the grammars that we use for language, the grammars that we use for accounting. So you see language speaks about causal things like in chains of command. But now, what if we need now to become more aware socially of synchronicities?Jean-François Noubel (47:32.098)What if we need to become socially aware of emergence that we can't explain through causal language? How do we build those grammars in our everyday language? So those things will certainly emerge. But you see, we have some creativity ahead of us. And I don't think many people understand the magnitude of that evolution just happening. And so back to...You see, holochain and the, and the disintermediation, as we see the greater story than just yet another technology, I see this, these new level of meta writing and meta storytelling, something that goes way beyond what we've already seen and that will transform us internally as well. Our psyche will completely transform in those new realities. Our languages will completely transform into these new realities.Currencies also will transform. We cannot see currency as just tokens of debt that we exchange anymore. They'll become a language of flow, a language of currents, a language of non-linear thinking, of complex thinking, of complex realities, just about to happen.Lucas TauilSo, Jean-François, do I understand correctly that you see Holochain as a way to tell stories about the stories? It is a space to create agreements about agreements.Jean-François NoubelExactly, a meta grammar that allows you to compose new grammars. What kind of agreements do you need to do carpooling? What kind of agreements do you need to deal with clean water? What kind of agreements do we need to build education at a local space, in local environment or a global one? What kind of language do we need for global things at the earth level which we need? We can't justJean-François Noubel (49:29.666)go back to local communities. hear so many people say, hey, let's go back to local communities. Yes and no. I mean, yes, OK, local and global.Lucas TauilSo in this new story that contains stories, in this new rule set framework, what do you see Holochain doing? So it opens this possibility of telling many stories, of having many roles. What emerges from this?Jean-François NoubelWell, currencies, currencies themselves. So currencies as a new language of wealth and new language of flows. Money, as we know, creates a one dimensional language for trading movable wealth. So you can see currencies today as kind of living stories. They catalyze new stories. They seed new stories. They seed new ways to look at the world, some kind ofgrammars for new stories to emerge. Holochain can do that. And hopefully other technologies, of course, we have to see just like the birth of writing, new technologies will arise here and there and hopefully will create an ecosystem so that distributed living systems can emerge.Lucas TauilSo there's a space of having visibility to flows and how they connect to the agreements of specific communities. There's another layer related to mutual currencies where the currencies can represent real things rather than a scarcity fiat currency. I'm particularly interested in representingLucas Tauil (51:22.22)real wealth. So your capacity to write a film or a book and how can we generate within our communities credit on a way that is mutual but not sucked by intermediators. How we can create our wealth based on the very existence of the things we create.Jean-François NoubelWell, one of the important things here, let's not go into a one-fits- all system. Hence why Holochain doesn't mean one system, but a Lego that we give to people so they can compose their rules. Because what kind of tax system will they do? Do we take a 10 % for every transaction as a VAT? So the design of a tax system, how do we mutualize the wealth that we see?So we just apply, we formalize in a new grammar things that already exist and that should reflect and put in dynamic motion our value system and the way we see the world. Hence why we can see currencies as dynamic stories. It has a story in it.Lucas TauilJF, I'm hearing you're telling the story of Holochain and you've been telling the story of Holochain for at least six years, if not more. How did this story evolve?Jean-François Noubel (52:59.298)You know what? I don't think it has evolved that much. Maybe I have a more refined way to say it today, but 10 years ago, I would probably have told you something quite similar. The things that emerge, that evolve, goes more into deepening it than taking a different course. Maybe where I would add something, think artificial intelligence will play a huge role.in this and we may not have enough awareness of that in the Holochain ecosystem and again because I see most people sometimes rejecting technology because they're confused with how we use the technology so I see lots of people and are scared about artificial intelligence or like many other things but I rather ask them whose hand holds the hammer? Whose hand holds the tool?As a more powerful question than the technology itself. Imagine that, you know, what artificial intelligence, which to me looks more like collective intelligence, you know, what it can do to gather billions and billions of data in a distributed system and give you augmented holopticism. Like, what kind of angle and state of the system do you need to see?From what you do as a doctor, as a parent, as a citizen, as a journalist, as an old person, maybe who will die soon, and whatever. You need different angles. You don't need the whole thing. You need an angle. So just like on the sports field, you see the game, have holopticism. You got trained by this. You got trained to read what happens on the sports field.And maybe as a spectator, you don't play, but you so much love this dynamic relationship between the player and the whole. And you have this fascination of this. OK, so it gives us pleasure to experience holopticism because it gives you the range of possibilities because you get informed about the whole and not in a chain of command way, but because you have the sense of the whole. And artificial intelligence can do that.Jean-François Noubel (55:20.948)It can get all this data and gather it and also turn it into a storytelling for you. Not just analysis, but it can tell you today, well, you know, we need more care for the elderly because it knows you can do that. And because it knows you loves how to do this and it can give you some possibilities of things that you can do that you like in accordance to your profile in the system. And by the way, it knows a lot about your profile because you've created so much semiotic traces here and there that it can also build a sense of you and The sense of you doesn't mean something bad per se. I feel terrified if it goes in the hands of centralized powers, yes But if it gets anonymized if it goes if you have access to that information for yourself You decide who you share it with and what for I feel totally okay with this because we already do thatSo where I would see myself evolve in the past years goes into the artificial intelligence, which to me seems more like some form of collective intelligence, which also embraces the biases, of course, and the intoxications that it can have as well. So we need to work on those questions. But I see the combination of Holochain and distributed systems technologies with artificial intelligence as the next leverage for aHuge, huge evolution there.Lucas TauilJean-François, it's so inspiring to hear you speaking of Holopticism as this sensing of each other, you know? I feel like there's a tango playing and we're dancing and I think I got it. And this is our intention to create a space where we can see each other and where we can create together in flow, in joy, rather than in dread in this upward spiral. I love how you brought it and wrapped it onLucas Tauil (57:20.634)a way where I feel super comfortable to speak about it. I couldn't articulate it in a way that I felt generative initially. And it feels like the perfect place for us to wrap it. I think we have a very well-constructed first step into this space. Very, very thankful for your time and your brilliance. The glint in your eyes is just huge inspiration.Thank you very much.Jean-François NoubelThank you so much.Clara Chemin - Narrator(58:10.638)Thanks for joining us at Entangled Futures. Subscribe to our channel for more conversations on mutuality. Towards a world that works for all.
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