WHY ANATHA Towards a New Economy of Abundance
Edward DeLeon Hickman
“YOU NEVER CHANGE THINGS BY FIGHTING THE EXISTING REALITY. TO CHANGE SOMETHING, BUILD A NEW MODEL THAT MAKES THE EXISTING MODEL OBSOLETE.” ― BUCKMINSTER FULLER
ANATHA
OUR NAME, ANATHA, COMES FROM ANATHAPINDIKA, THE CHIEF LAY DISCIPLE OF GAUTAMA BUDDHA CONSIDERED BY MANY TO EXEMPLIFY THE THE BUDDHIST VIRTUE OF GENEROSITY. This fundamental principle is what interests us, inspires us, and drives us: building systems of generosity, of abundance — systems built for collective creation rather than atomized consumption Let’s begin with identifying the problem: What we refer to as structures of violence. Structural violence is any system or organization that prevents human beings from self-actualizing. This manifests in many ways, from the insidious everyday assault on well-being to broad reaching devastation of entire populations. In both cases, there is tremendous loss, socially, economically and individually, as people are in varied ways prevented from realizing their potential.What is so dangerously insidious about this is that, as a culture, we assume it’s just the way it is. We even assume scarcity is a fundamental condition of life — and so we accept, perhaps with a sigh, that some people will inevitably starve and die. So it goes, we say to ourselves. We may or may not think this is a bad thing but, in both cases, we assume it’s a necessary thing. EDWARD DELEON HICKMAN
BACKGROUND It is precisely this assumption that we want to question. At Anatha, we recognize the way things are. But we choose to challenge the assumption that it’s natural or inevitable. We’re focused on the way things are evolving — and on the way things could be instead, if we just put our minds, wills, and resources to it. No doubt, we could discuss why these systems of violence exist. But while the past can teach us many lessons, we’re not interested in assigning blame — instead, we’re interested in identifying the problem clearly in order to create solutions.
EDWARD DELEON HICKMAN
We’re not naive. We see the scale of the problem. In addition to an earth that is being scorched by a system of unbridled consumption, roughly half of the people in the world today live well below the poverty line. For the third year in a row, food insecurity has risen globally, touching nearly a billion lives. Another quarter billion people don’t have access to a decent education and a shameful 1.6 billion lack adequate shelter. Setting the tremendous moral dilemma poverty presents aside for a moment to consider the issue in purely economic terms, it’s extremely inefficient to allow so much human resource to go to waste. Every individual we fail to self-actualize is a net loss to society — someone who didn’t contribute their insight, wit, intelligence, love. We lose that person’s productivity, their social contribution, their purpose, and whatever potential that might have emerged had conditions around them been more favorable. Simply put, people who do not have adequate resources to meet their basic needs cannot self-actualize, and we are all the lesser for it. We all lose the potential of that person, who is scrambling just to survive.And while the problem is enormous, we believe the opportunity is equally big.
EDWARD DELEON HICKMAN
The solution is deceptively simple. Decentralization creates fundamentally new models in which people are no longer consumers or products: they become partners. This is a radical shift, and precisely what excites us about this technology. We believe that the systems of the future are both generative and abundant, that by giving back users the value that they themselves create by their inclusion in our ecosystem, we can create a self-sustaining solution to the global problem of structural violence. Needless to say, we don’t expect that we will solve these massive problems alone or all at once. On the contrary, we believe it will take an entire ecosystem, a network of networks, myriad information-age economic tools to unlock value on a global scale. This in turn will position humanity to free itself from structural violence once and for all, via self-sustaining systems of structural flourishing. The information age has already revolutionized media and communications in ways we could not have dreamed of mere decades ago. We believe the emergence of decentralized trust networks, digital assets, and immutable ledgers are better understood when viewed as the transition from industrial age economic-governance tools into information age economic governance tools. Now is the time to transform the rest of our civilization by bringing our economic and governance systems into the information age as well.
EDWARD DELEON HICKMAN
Such is the promise, and possibility, of decentralization. And such is our promise at Anatha. One focus of Anatha’s projects is platform interoperability and network cooperation. We build environments that unlock value for the user, that can in turn be used to purchase real goods and services. We are engineering systems of abundance that perpetuate collective prosperity.Taken in that light, it is then perhaps easier to understand Anatha’s central supposition: that information age economic tools have the potential to unlock an age of abundance, (which also explains the title of my upcoming book, “An Information Age of Abundance”). This in turn will allow us to tackle the seemingly insurmountable problem of Structural Violence — by creating what we at Anatha call systems of “Structural Flourishing.” Structural Flourishing is any system, organization, or government that facilitates the self-actualization of human beings. We believe this is not only possible due to the advent of trustless, decentralized, information age economic tools: we believe these outcomes to be both inevitable and tremendously profitable for any organization or government that rallies behind their emergence.
EDWARD DELEON HICKMAN
THIS IS ANATHA’S PURPOSE. We bu i l d systems that comb a t s t ructural viol e n c e , b y creatin g envi r o n m e nts in which stru c t u r a l flourishing can t a k e root instead. We pu t h u mans at the fore f r o n t of all of our desi g n c h oices: human solu t i o n s f or a dist i n c t l y human prob l e m .