Holographic Solutions to Blockchain Problems
This was a 5 minute talk I gave at the book launch for Radical Friends, a book edited by Penny Rafferty and Ruth Catlow.
The Hologram is a social technology practised by people on couches and in beds all over the world.
It is a peer to peer health project that aims to create long term health and stability in an unstable world for anyone who uses it, so that we can survive the end of capitalism and have the capacity to create something better out of the rubble.Â
How does it work? [face audience directly, begin forceful hypnotic monotone]
I'm going to tell you how you will do it. It doesn't cost any money, but it does take time and effort, because you are going to organise your own care. It will be hard, and it will be worth it. Each of you will start by inviting three people who you know, to meet with you regularly over time. They are your triangle. The four of you will meet every season or so, and they will ask you questions about your social, emotional and physical health. Slowly over time, these people will become your living medical record, and they will fill up a notebook with notes about you. They will see your patterns with you. When you need to make a big decision, you will not be alone. After a little while, you will ask each of your triangle members what kind of support they would like, and specifically, you will ask them: do you want to have your own hologram? When they do, you will help them set them up with 3 friends, and they will receive support from three people besides you. They will do this for the rest of their lives.
Where did it come from and how does it work?Â
It was an idea that came from the Greek Solidarity Clinics, who modeled something like this in a free anarchist clinic. We absorbed their idea and remade it as a peer to peer project that could be practiced among friends.
During the pandemic, many people began to practice it because we started to teach online courses and workshops about it supported at Furtherfield.Â
By practicing it over and over again with thousands of people, online and offline, we refined the protocol. It is currently practiced by thousands of people around the world, underneath all the other care they can borrow or steal.Â
This social practice can exist no matter what technology is available. Our hardware and our software is extremely resilient.
The Hologram is a distributed organization with people organizing and facilitating all over the world, more and more each month.Â
Many people have offered us blockchain and other tech solutions to our problems.
Our first problem is that everyone is locked into an individualistic, competitive framework that ultimately makes most people afraid of each other. Most of us are so afraid of asking for help, of being weak or vulnerable, and so we live in relative isolation. And this means we can't organize the revolution we need, which we need everyone there for.Â
Our second problem is that while everything and everyone is broken in ways you already know, in the meantime, caregiving in its most expanded sense, and caregivers are not valued, and most of the world's caregivers are violently neglected by a society that needs them more than ever.Â
Our technological solution is to ensure that all caregivers are cared for.Â
What problems could blockchain solve? Sometimes it feels like Blockchain is the response to a messy wish. It's as if lots of men wished for a way out of capitalism and nationalism, and out of their own responsibility to each other. The details of the wish were unclear so we ended up with a distraction instead of a solution. And then, like any baby born in capitalism, the little Blockchain got turned into a capitalist monster.
We think that we need a new solutionism. We would like to suggest the following: Hologram solutions to Blockchain Problems.