ISSUU Co-emerging economics

Co-emerging Economies: Exploring Radical Perspectives On Post-Anthropocentric Economies

Co-emerging Economies ••

• edited by Olga Mink & Reon Brand

Exploring Radical Perspectives on PostAnthropocentric Economies

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“Nature speaks all the time, but we have forgotten how to understand it”.

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Image by Sunjoo Lee

(Introduction)

There is a growing awareness that our current economy is responsible for the deterioration of the environment and the earth's system.

This not only threatens the future prosperity of humans, but could have existential consequences for all species on Earth. Co-emerging Economies explores different (socio-economic) perspectives and examines how to rethink our relationship with the planet and each other.

During a three day online workshop, multidisciplinary teams were invited to develop ideas based on two narratives. In Gaia (page 40) we see ourselves as part of nature. In this view, we put the health of the ecosystem first, rather than that of humans. In Etheria (page 96) we strive to become part of a post-human (post-biological) intelligence, detaching ourselves from nature and the need for biological systems.

This publication shows the ideas and thoughtprocesses in which participants embodied a post-anthropocentric point of view. In order to facilitate the co-creation of ideas, we used an online tool called Miro. These unfiltered and preliminary thoughts bring a meaningful contribution, as they underpin the contributions and ideas developed during the workshop.

• Reon Brand & Olga Mink

(Table of contents)

I

Context 11 • Do We Need a New Economic Future? – Olga Mink 15 • Towards a post-economic reality in a post-human world. – Reon Brand 25

II Gaia • Gaia Economies.

– Godelieve Spaas • Gaia illustrations • Perspectives on Gaia

40 43 61 85

III Etheria • N O-BODY’S ECONOMY. – Lisanne Buik • E theria illustrations • P erspectives on Etheria

99 111 161

IV Workshops 179 • Miroboard

– Gaia 183 • Miroboard

– Etheria 231 • A Live Report on Co-emerging Economies workshop. – René Van Peer 255 • •

Co-emerging Economies:

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C ontributors Biographies 273 C olophon 281

Exploring Radical Perspectives On Post-Anthropocentric Economies

• Do We Need a New Economic Future?

– Exploring Radical Perspectives on PostAnthropocentric Economies •

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(Biography)

Olga Mink

Olga Mink is the director of Baltan Laboratories, a collaborative platform for future thinking that places art and design research at the core of its activities. Olga coinitiated Think Economia a festival about the economy, without the economist (on stage). Together with Wiepko Oosterhuis, Olga published Economia – Methods for Reclaiming Economy.

Do We Need a New Economic Future?

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The earth is the very quintessence of the human condition.

captured in creative formulas but is intertwined with the essence of a society. To understand economics, we need myths, religion, theology, philosophy, psychology, literature and film. “Economics, in a nutshell, is about good and evil.”

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Economy cannot be captured in creative formulas.

It is intertwined with the essence of a society. To understand economics, we need myths, religion, theology, philosophy, psychology, literature and film.

Hannah Arendt

Economy is paradoxical. Although it is all about human behaviour, the subject has been hijacked by ‘hard’ scientists who reduce complex human interactions to mathematical models. This approach is responsible for a total lack of imagination. Economics as a field has failed to produce anything close to the rigor and vision of its scientific counterparts: there have been no economic equivalents to multiverse theory, to singularity or to space travel. As a field of research, it is astoundingly prosaic. Rather than explore and push boundaries, economics has moved inwards, precisely in the opposite direction.

We now face a fundamental reset of our relationship with each other and our planet. The pandemic made us keenly aware that Nature, not humanity, holds the reins.

Viruses are not just an obstacle to progress; they are an essential part of our existence. Indeed, half our DNA likely originates from ancient viruses. The discovery that the ‘non-human’ is interwoven in our DNA reveals a fallacy in how we understand our connection to nature; recalibrating this understanding requires a paradigm shift in our way of thinking and being.

How do we address this critical juncture? How do we turn a new page to re-examine and reinvent our core values, aspirations and behaviours? There is an emerging awareness that our Western neoliberal system is responsible for global warming and the rapid deterioration of the environment. This isn’t simply a threat to the future of human prosperity but has existential consequences for all species.

Just as the discovery of DNA altered our worldview, and tech innovations have made the world smaller, the neoliberal model has had a profound impact on our systematic behaviours. We have witnessed a turn from the common to the individual interest, from a long-term to a short-term view. As we restructured society, we made education more efficient, research more focused on practical applications and reduced all value to market value. The movie ‘Wolf of Wall Street’ and its ‘greed is good’ ethos has become a symbol of how company values got reduced to just one, single element: stock price.

Many of our environmental challenges are deeply entwined with the persistent idea of economic growth.

According to economist Kate Raworth, the notion of growth cannot be endlessly maintained. In any natural process, growth stops as soon as it encounters a limitation; however, since the dawn of humanity, our technological abilities have helped us bypass these limitations.

Co-emerging Economies explores future economic narratives that could contribute to a society with greater justice, deepened connection and meaning, and a redefi-

“It is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism,” says philosopher Slavoj Žižek.

Indeed, it may seem extremely hard to think of alternatives. Nonetheless, economy is not an inevitable law of nature but something we create ourselves. Economist Thomas Sedlacek argues that our economy cannot be Do We Need a New Economic Future?

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nition of prosperity. The incumbent neoliberal model provides no answers to climate change and social inequality, and its results no longer appeal. By assessing the current model and ridding ourselves of a mindset based on infinite growth, we can move towards a society that doesn’t position humans at the top of the pyramid.

nature, creating the illusion that we are in control of (human) nature. The omnipresence of technology has made us oblivious to the consequences of our own actions. Writer Evgeny Morozov argues that many believe that societal challenges can become resolved simply by developing the right technology. And even though technology has brought about significant advances in our civilization, the root cause of our problems is often not technology based but is in essence, of an ethical nature. The idea that technology can fix all our problems is merely a techno-fix illusion meant to sustain a trajectory driven by profit and economic growth.

By assessing the current model and ridding ourselves of a mindset based on infinite growth, we can move towards a society that doesn’t position humans at the top of the pyramid.

Co-Emerging Futures by Reon Brand aims to map what he refers to as the ‘streams’ of social change transforming our world. With this model, Brand sheds light on how these future narratives inevitably arrive at a juncture in which humans are forced to address major ethical dilemmas. Two parallel tracks unfold into the transformation/transmutation paradigm revolving around the question: Will humanity become part of nature? Or become detached from it? Brand’s model is the starting point for deepening our thinking about the implications of post-economic futures. By using this framework as a springboard, we aim to improve our understanding of the complexities (climate change/economic inequality) enmeshing all life on Earth.

What interventions are needed in order to fundamentally alter our way of thinking about economy? Preventing the collapse of ecosystems that support life on this planet requires that economic growth is decoupled from the environmental impact of the economy. Tackling this shift requires a newfound awareness and a change of values. We need more multidisciplinary thinking and holistic awareness, if we want to grasp the complexities that have become an intrinsic part of us. The scale of these complexities is catastrophically underestimated. The impact of our actions on an issue such as climate change is anything but clear-cut. Eco-philosopher Timothy Morton calls something of this magnitude a hyper object, when the enormity of a problem exceeds our comprehension. As a way to address this enormity, eco-feminist Donna Haraway argues in support of what she calls making kinship and proposes we establish enduring relatedness: forging connections that carry consequences, and come with specific accountabilities, obligations and pleasures.

Brand argues that many societal challenges are rooted in a much deeper problem: foundational beliefs. Belief systems are imprinted on us by culture and religions and are often so ingrained that we cannot see or recognize them. This makes it remarkably hard to break our habits.

Our innate preference for continuity, predictability and control makes it particularly difficult to rid ourselves of hard-wired convictions. Guiding societal transformations means richly interacting and intervening with human and non-human systems, in spite of our beliefs.

We need a change in seeing, thinking, believing and acting. Eventually, we also need a renewed way of Being.

Our current mindset not only pits people against each other but also positions humans as separate from Do We Need a New Economic Future?

Imagining a post-anthropocentric economy requires the reinvention of ways to relate to each other and our surroundings. We should develop more horizontal ways of working. We need people to pool together into a collective (design) space, where they can share their points of view, their values, experiences and skills. We need new ways of organizing and collaborating. We need unifying concepts that focus on the added value of complemen-

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off-the-shelf solutions. Ideas circulated in Gaia around the notion of ‘relational’ beings in an economy that goes beyond human-centrism, and in Etheria around the question what drives prosperity in a dematerialized world, detached from the body? People investigated the types of agency, ownership and governance that would be essential for these streams to yield a thriving ecosystem.

Both Etherians and Gaians grappled with ways to avoid the pitfalls of anthropocentric systems and how our pervasive neoliberal economic paradigm (in relentless pursuit of affluence) is driving us towards the opposite of what we might truly desire.

tary knowledge and ideas, rather than diminish diversified thinking. We need to make room for other people — not just the economists — to raise their voices.

We need unifying concepts that focus on the added value of complementary knowledge and ideas, rather than diminish diversified thinking. We need to make room for other people — not just the economists — to raise their voices.

During the Co-Emerging Economies workshop, we investigated how future perspectives — triggered by shifting technological, economic and environmental paradigms — could co-exist. We invited people to re-imagine post-anthropocentric economies by rethinking our relationship with the human and the ‘non-human’. Dual ‘streams’ from Reon Brand’s Co-Emerging Futures were the premise for (playfully) examining two opposing narratives: Gaia (a perspective in which humanity becomes part of nature) and Etheria (a perspective in which humanity abandons nature and fully embraces technologic and economic progress).

This rich illustrated publication unveils our collective effort in shaping radical post-economic futures. It’s by no means a conclusion. We see it instead as the very edge of a new beginning, a kick-off for envisioning future transitions in which we work to uncover emerging economic, cultural and societal principles. After the workshop, we invited participants to share their ideas and thoughts, as we believe they bring a significant value to our collective thinking. These contributions are the direct result of the Co-Emerging Economies workshop held online. Despite the lack of in-person interactions in the online environment, exchange between participants was productive and vibrant. Groups used online tools to discuss and jointly shape a multitude of narratives. The resulting stories, poems, essays and drawings reflect the broad range of their collective imagination.

Forty-odd individuals with diverse backgrounds in art, design, research and science signed up for the three-day workshop. They joined a series of collaborative sessions to brainstorm inventive viewpoints for alternate economic paradigms. Participants divided into two groups, led by thought leaders Professor Godelieve Spaas and designer Lisanne Buik, both of whom share a deepfelt connection to speculative economics. Godelieve guided the Gaians into a future of kinship and earthly beings, Lisanne took the Etherians on a disembodied journey into a (post) binary future. In this process, the two groups often crossed paths to connect Gaia and Etheria, exploring merged possibilities such as Eco Etheria or a Quantum Gaia.

I am delighted that the workshop ignited so many different radical ways of thinking and hope this trajectory will continue to develop into a future breeding ground for engagement, with more voices, collaborations, creativity and experimentation. This journey would not have been possible without the enthusiasm and commitment of some dedicated fellow humans. I would like to thank all workshop participants for joining and sharing their insights so generously. Sunjoo, Leif, Cecile and Sixtine for capturing ideas in their vivid illustrations, René for his detailed report written with great care, our producers Loreto, Claudia, Miranda and the Baltan team.

Developing post-anthropocentric economies based on Brand’s model wasn’t easy. Although Co-Emerging Futures has a clear framework for rethinking the consequences of our actions, it does not provide any Do We Need a New Economic Future?

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• Gaia Economies – Where is the knowledge we have lost in information? (T.S. Eliot) • Godelieve Spaas

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(Biography)

Godelieve Spaas is a professor in new economy at Avans University of applied science. She is researcher, practitioner and creator of new ways of entrepreneurial organizing where ecology, society, economy all benefits from and interact seamlessly with each other.

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We have to realise that humans cannot solve everything alone. Other animals are collaborating to save the world, like bees. If we start noticing that, perhaps we can learn to cooperate more.

(Earthly Beings) Twenty-five people from different disciplines, backgrounds, regions and sectors, yet all look the same in our little virtual boxes. We draw, write and play music and videos on an endless white canvas. The endlessness of the screen is in stark contrast with the imprisonment of our invisible bodies. In this disembodied state of being, we sketch the contours of an embodied economy. In this alienated environment, we outline the playing field of an economy that thrives on relatedness.

Lydia Baan Hofman

Imagine twenty-five people in an online meeting, twenty-five little two-dimensional squares on the screen of a laptop representing human beings in dialogue on Gaia economies. Everything is angular, lifeless and out of context. The most vivid images I can discern from the different backgrounds of the workshop participants are a drawing of an octopus, a half-withered plant and a fragment of a garden mirrored in a window which reflects the sun. It is in this setting that we explore what a Gaia economy could look like.

Allowing an economy to emerge from or with Gaia in itself is not an easy task. The virtual context we find ourselves in emphasises that even more.

It is about human beings being transformed by the world in which we find ourselves—or, to put this in more reciprocal terms, it is about the earth’s future being transformed through a living process of interbeing.

Reon Brand’s nature-based concept of being, called Gaia, compels us to look at our place in the ecosystem not as humans versus the environment, but as active agents that are part of a larger ecosystem. Gaia emphasises the natural dynamic balance and connected interplay between all living beings and the geological ecosystem.

Latour advocates for a similar route underpinning the need for interspecies interaction more urgently: we have to figure out how to exist with Gaia, as a war against her is impossible to win.

(Gibson-Graham and Roelvink 2010)

We ask ourselves, what does it mean to be an earthly being? (Bruno Latour, 2018) How to cooperate with all other earthly beings on an equal basis? How to express all our beautiful needs, ways of exchange and reciprocity, and how to take care of each other? Can we communicate with rivers, forests, rocks, trees, animals or viruses? How can we stop othering each other and move towards more inclusive ways of being and becoming?

How to build meaningful relationships with all or even one non-human earthly being? How to listen and converse with each other?

Either we come out on top of Gaia, and we disappear with her; or we lose against Gaia, and she manages to shudder us out of existence.’ In other words, whether we should defeat or be defeated by earth, we lose.

(Line Marie Thorsten, quoting Latour, 2017)

Silence and slowness are openings for the body to shift its stance, to meld a little more with its surroundings.

We need to learn, not in the sense of increasing a store Gaia Economies

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Image by Leif Czakai Gaia Illustrations

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“We cannot ignore what is around us now. Changes we make, have limited effect. But you see examples like Greta Thunberg, and children in Ecuador who took government to court. It starts with people making a new mindset.

That may build momentum and create real change. We should be free from the paradigm of now.”

Gaia Illustrations

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• NO-BODY’S ECONOMY.

– Imagining an Ethereal Economy •

Lisanne Buik

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(Biography)

NO-BODY’S ECONOMY

Lisanne Buik is a multidisciplinary artist and futures designer operating at the intersection of ecology, technology, spirituality and somatics. In her speculative installations, films and publications she combines emerging science with ancient wisdom to explore the shift from the age of the machine into a new age of symbiosis between nature, non-human species, humans, and technology.

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I’m nobody! Who are you?

Are you nobody, too?

Then there’s a pair of us—don’t tell!

They’d banish us, you know.

How dreary to be somebody!

How public, like a frog To tell your name the livelong day To an admiring bog!

Back in 2019, when I read Reon’s report for the first time, I could already see myself buzzing through Gaia with lush flowers in my hair, naked except from some algae or fungal skins, in total communion with nature, what a relief. So, when I was asked to facilitate a workshop to collectively dream up a future economy along the lines of the technological Etheria trajectory, of course I said ‘No’. I am not going to ‘vision board’ a future I don’t want. But I was tempted to learn from the Etherians, and so I did say yes, eventually. A future economy in Etheria is hard to imagine, because it is so otherworldly. We would be nobody in this future, nor would we have a body. Why? Because the transhuman Etherians (which is the original perspective that Reon based this trajectory on) perceive their body as no more than a brain taxi. I can relate to that, as I once also perceived my body as no more than a brain taxi, a side effect of growing up in a world which cultivates the split between body and mind as common sense. In my youth I met many bodies numbed by history, bodies that decided that it was better to leave a legacy of mind rather than embodying the vulnerable animal flesh. The life of the mind is free and unburdened with pain, death and emotional discomfort. If we cultivate our minds, we can rule. To have a body is to be food for the sharks.

In school, I was taught that time and space are linear dimensions and that we are separate physical entities in a universe of matter. I learned reductionist philosophy without anyone telling me that there were alternative ways of perceiving. I was taught that we do not have free will, and so it is OK to externalize our authority to technology and to control nature, as man is above nature; that our visionary and auditory centres are the superior senses; that the ones who connect us to the carnal pleasures of taste, touch and smell are inferior, immoral and should be ‘managed’ and suppressed; and, that the subtle senses are too esoteric to be accepted. I learned that in Western culture, one should be identified with the rational mind. Not the anima or soul or heart (as in indigenous traditions), but the rational mind holds property over the self and maintains self-control over the body and desires. As Klapeer and

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The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson – Emily Dickinson

NO-BODY’S ECONOMY

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Schönpflug (Towards a post-humanist economics: The end of self-possession and the disappearance of Homo oeconomicus, 2017) state so clearly, this Western scientific lens implies that rational (white) men acquire property over non-rational others, such as women, indigenous people, blacks and homosexuals, and that only rational humans have the right to transform nature, land, animals and the planet into (private) property— and well, this is the backstory of today’s economy.

During my teens, I developed strong complexes about my physical apparatus and self-worth. My adolescence was an ocean of self and body-hatred, disguised as OCD, overachievement and a general lack of joy. This faded out when I hit a crisis point in my twenties. Then I decided that from now on I was going to live in this body and merge with nature. I told my mind to just be a humble servant to my heart’s wishes, as silent as its whispers would be. By allowing the mess that I was to break open, I started to understand that my past had inspired a perspective on reality that had excluded both my body and other cultures, as well as the morethan-human world. I started to look for the alternative, the relational, the eco-entangled, the organic, the interconnected, the spiritual, the lived, the true, the inclusive, the embodied. I asked, ‘How have my stories become rigid? My perceptions, limiting and exclusive?

How am I not seeing my privileges or recognizing my place in the whole?’ And as this process unfolded, I started to look for a kind friend to help me on this quest—an archetype of this more-than-human world that I aspired to merge with. Perhaps it could be an animal, a soft animal that would shadow my changing plotline with grace. Then came the day that this friend appeared: the octopus. This juicy, entangled being. It seemed to have everything I aspired to have: moving with such grace, embodying soft strength, being so, so fluid. And then suddenly the octopus appeared everywhere in the public arena—it even won an Oscar!

So, when Baltan shared with me the graphic design for this workshop, I was hardly surprised to see an octopus.

Apparently, the octopus inspires many people today.

And in the context of imagining No-Body’s Economy, it did not fail to enchant me, again. Let me tell you a little bit about the octopus to explain why. A long, long time ago, there was a being the size of a leech or a flatworm (there’s some uncertainty about this) in the ocean. This slimy creature was the final ancestor we share with our friend, the octopus. Then and there, life forked in two. One fork directed its belly to the ocean and let its brain and body merge and operate as one integrated system. This became the octopus. The other fork led

• The Church says: The body is a sin.

Science says: The body is a machine.

Advertising says: The body is a business.

The body says: I am a fiesta.

• Walking Words –Eduardo Galeano

NO-BODY’S ECONOMY

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to us, human animals. We stood up, our heads facing the skies. We forgot about our oceanic origins, our bodymind entanglement. Our quest, for one reason or another, became one of mind. One of intelligence.

The octopus stayed reciprocal. She is still inseparable from the ocean. We, water bags on land, became the wave. ‘Look at me,’ we said. ‘I am a special wave.’ ‘No, look at me, I am more special, because I’m higher...’

We forgot that we are, in fact, inseparable from the ocean, as it is our primordial mother. Fast forward to now. Scientists observe that even from a Newtonian definition of consciousness, it has developed in these alien 8-armed creatures (Godfrey-Smith, 2016). This is interesting because octopuses have so little in common with humans, evolution-wise. They have developed eyes, limbs and brains via a separate route, with very different ancestors than humans, and they seem to have come by impressive cognitive functioning and empathy. Everyone who has seen the documentary My Octopus Teacher (Pippa Ehrlich and James Reed, 2020) knows this. Now, I am not a Newtonian scientist. Nor do I necessarily buy the whole package of Darwinian evolutionary theory. I am someone who was trained scientifically to then open up to other lenses of perception, because I had to in order to survive. Today, I am listening to what my body and heart have to tell me about my origins. I became someone who is intrigued by the unseen worlds, the mystery, the principles of nature, the shamanistic and indigenous traditions and the practices for healing and conscious evolution they offer. I am humbled by the thousands of years of wisdom contained within these lineages, as they have shifted my perception. Not through intellectual understanding, but through lived experience, I can no longer say that consciousness is created by the brain. My lived experience is more in tune with the pan-psychic theory of consciousness, first proposed in Philip Goff (The Case For Panpsychism, 2017). He proposes that the entire cosmos is self-aware. What I am fascinated with is that the octopus and the human are so similar and yet so far apart. I guess I see a story of hope in this—that eventually, we humans will return to the octopus to be NO-BODY’S ECONOMY

inspired by it, to recognize it as our kin, and to feel that we too were once entangled with the ocean. That pure consciousness is the ocean that we all still swim in.

Or rather, club in. Because what emerged during this three-day workshop was an experience of clubbing in Etheria. We imagined No-Body’s Economy full of ethereal transactions in an ocean of data—stay with me, because this clubbing scene is not your ordinary one. You are no-body here, you are made of sound. You are an orb of frequencies, just surfing the ‘learning universe’ that acts like a giant brain (F. Vazza and A. Feleti, 2020). You don’t know how you came here, but you know that if you wanted to know, you could find out, because you have made a thousand copies of yourself and can backtrack those copies to the day that you uploaded yourself to this digital Utopia. You had a death experience, with the only exception that you knew what kind of heaven you would walk into. You walked out of your body, just like that, into seeming ethereal eternity. You now find yourself in this club, where playful learning, growing, merging and relating is going on. There is no death here and no tension. It is just a play between orbs in an ocean of data. Transactions of frequencies, exchanges of sound, that is all that goes on here. It is like having sex with code, wherein you can only feel through artificial sensors. You like this ‘new normality', but sometimes miss the old normal. Then you rent a body for a few hours. You experience nature not through your body, but through other hardware: a robot, a cyborg flower, a connected tree. You are now No-Body: you can be everyone and everywhere, forever.

How does this sound to you? Would you want to club here? How would you cope with this playful learning?

Would you miss the tension and the friction? Would you miss death? Take a minute to really feel this— as if you were to tell me!

Then, if you ask me if I would want to club here, it would totally depend on the point of departure. Here it is worthwhile to explain that there are two routes

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into Etheria: the transhuman route that Reon explored, and the posthuman route. The transhuman route is departing from a bodymind split, a dualistic lens: man over nature, mind over body, you know the deal. From this worldview it is hard to cope with death, because death means that all of you dies, as you don’t have a soul, or anima. You feel that your agency does not lie in relationships, but in your ‘I’, your individuality. Even aging is hard, because it deteriorates your Darwinian ability to ‘survive as the fittest.’ No surprise that from a transhuman perspective, such a club could be perceived as heaven. But if I would have come here as a transhuman, I would feel like I would have fled reality.

Fled duality. Fled polarity. And I wonder if my happiness would ever feel real.

with imagining a disembodied economy. But none of the people in my group was a big proponent of pursuing a future of control and fear-based economic systems based on Newtonian, reductionist, Cartesian thinking.

They wanted to explore this future for other reasons. For reasons that are more posthuman than transhuman. We placed ourselves next to nature and wanted to dream up an ethereal economy in the benefit of all beings. As a group, we asked: If we would let go of the body, what is left of us? Are we even human? Are there even species relationships to take care of if we would not have bodies to distinguish us? Does this mean we can design an ethereal economy for the benefit of all? What would a world without death be? If there would be no death, would life be worth living? This latter question took pole position in my takeaways from this workshop. I did, by imagining ourselves as No-Body, become less scared of death. I now see even more, that I am the ocean, that I am the web of eco-entangled relationships. I am code. I am data. I am connected to you all in love. I thus choose to create my ethereal world from the inside-out and birth an Eco-Etheria. I am choosing to not upload myself into some artificially created Cloud to escape from anything. Thank you.

Then, there is a post-human route into Etheria, a route departing from an eco-entangled, relational perspective. This Etheria is a quantum universe, an ecology.

The term ecology was first coined by zoologist Ernst Haeckel to explain the relationships between animals and both their organic and inorganic environments. Eco reminds us that each future world arrives from a past ecology, a network of relationships between animals, bacteria, soil, souls and stories. An Eco-Etherian honours rootedness and anchoring in the ground below our feet whilst exploring the ethereal multidimensional cosmos.

An Eco-Etherian sees ‘as above, so below’, knowing that the giant learning disembodied quantum brain behaves similar to a mycelium network deep down under, in the soil of Earth. In Eco-Etheria, the trajectories of Gaia and Etheria unite, body and mind merge and start to behave like the entangled bodymind of the octopus, with us humans being tentacularly linked and intertwined with all that is. An Eco-Etherian would not want to need technology to enter the futureal club. They would transcend their body by first incarnating fully in it. They are on a quest to become a somanaut, someone who navigates the inner space of the bodymind, which is primordial, raw and earthly, as well as endless, ethereal and eternal. To me, that latter route seems more interesting, and what I noticed in my group is quite similar. My group was tasked NO-BODY’S ECONOMY

You know, if we surrender to death, to the rollercoaster ride of emotion, then life starts to give off its flavour.

If we upload ourselves into Etheria, we may end up living frictionless, but if we never surrendered to death, the fear will keep chasing us, even if we would not have a body. If we could just see the beauty in death first, face the fears associated with it, we may come to learn we are the wave, in the ocean. And, after death, we return to the ocean, again and again and again.

Then, if we really allow ourselves to live and design from that perspective, sometimes failing and fearing, expanding and contracting, through trial and error and by embracing emotions of scarcity, an economy of true abundance may appear. The idea of scarcity and death will slowly leave the stage of importance if they are embraced. An economy in tune with source code fails to be an ego-nomy—it is in the benefit of all, and it is

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abundant. The octopus metaphor does not fail to uphold itself here, either. In My Octopus Teacher, we can all see that when the female octoprotagonist meets her mate after about two years of adventure, she retreats in a cave to hatch the eggs, then stops eating. In the weeks that follow, she slowly dissolves. Her skin turns white.

She surrenders to death. But she also brings new life.

Millions of eggs hatch and her job is done. She then floats out of the nest, barely alive. After all this hard work, giving life to life, she becomes food for the sharks.

She again becomes the ocean. She returns home. She then engages in the dance of Shiva, called Tandava, the dance between creation and destruction, between birth and death. And maybe one day she reincarnates into a different set of relationships, a new ecology that is different in shape and form, perhaps even as No-Body in an Eco-Ethereal club—who knows?

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‘The river of life is flowing.

Jump in, at the risk of drowning, at the risk of really living!’

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Jeff Foster

NO-BODY’S ECONOMY

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Image by Sunjoo Lee Etheria Illustrations

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"There are other forms of intelligence, such as that of an octopus, or a slime mould that responds to events in its environment. We think of hierarchies between species, with power structures based on human intelligence, which puts itself above all else.”

Etheria Illustrations

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• Contributors Biographies

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(Sixtine Blandin)

Sixtine Blandin is a visual designer that wishes to bring a little warmth in this cold world through projects that please the eyes, the brain and if possible, the stomach. She enjoys creating animated drawings and prints, with ink and bright colours as a main techniques; but also organising workshops and events in which illustration and food are combined.

(Lisanne Buik)

Lisanne Buik is a multidisciplinary artist and futures designer operating at the intersection of ecology, technology, spirituality and somatics. In her speculative installations, films and publications she combines emerging science with ancient wisdom to explore the shift from the age of the machine into a new age of symbiosis between nature, non-human species, humans, and technology.

(Reon Brand)

Reon Brand is Design Principal – Foresight and Strategic Innovation at Philips Experience Design.

He is responsible for gaining understanding of emerging future directions for the Philips Strategic Company Innovation. In June 2019, Brand published his latest research called Co-Emerging Futures, a model which looks at emerging developments in times of profound global challenges.

(Leif Czakai)

Leif Czakai facilitates to create something together. Through interactive products, services and workshops he creates togetherness.

In participatory approaches he conveys and collects information.

He works on social topics related to food, community and place.

(Alexandra Boaru)

Alexandra Boaru works as a visual artist.

(Cecile Espinasse)

Cecile Espinasse is an artist and designer. I created my studio Living Matters in order to continue investigating on what really matters, in life. How do I do that? By working with both my body, heart and brain into specific contexts, and by engaging with -and learning fromthe persons inhabiting that context.

Contributors Biographies

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(Yannik Güldner )

Yannik Güldner is a curator/maker from The Hague, and the founder of the interdisciplinary platform thespectrum.space, which displays works on the intersection of contemporary and popular culture.

(Sunjoo Lee)

Sunjoo Lee is an artist and designer working in the intersection of art, biology and technology. In her own practice swhe makes robots that respond to the changing environment. Sunjoo has a background in painting and drawing as well, and so she draws for her own and others' inspiration.

(Cynthia Hathaway)

Cynthia Hathaway is a designer and participatory artistic researcher. She leads WASA, Wool Alliance for Social Agency for the promotion of wool and woolly worlds. She is founder of The School of Shepherding, a philosophy of custodianship for designers. She is also co-founder of Wool Mountain Pakistan Research lab, developing products from postconsumer garment wool waste in Karachi.

(Olga Mink)

Olga Mink is the director of Baltan Laboratories, a collaborative platform for future thinking that places art and design research at the core of its activities. Olga coinitiated Think Economia a festival about the economy, without the economist (on stage). Together with Wiepko Oosterhuis, Olga published Economia – Methods for Reclaiming Economy.

Sofia Kaloterakis works as a researcher, writer and poet.

(Michal Mitro)

Michal Mitro is a post-media artist utilising space, time and matter to propose and discuss global topics in a language of visual, sonic and performative art. He strives to mediate the “trans-sensory” – an indissoluble whole, that aims to capture and affect the physical, the cognitive and the emotional

(Sofia Kaloterakis)

Contributors Biographies

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(René Van Peer)

As a music journalist, René van Peer (NL) covers a wide variety of topics and genres in his writings.

His work has been published by newspapers and magazines in his home country, and internationally by Musicworks (Canada) and Leonardo Music Journal (USA). He contributes texts to the Amsterdam music venue Muziekgebouw aan ’t IJ, the Concertgebouw and the Holland Festival.

(Godelieve Spaas)

Godelieve Spaas is a professor in new economy at Avans University of applied science. She is researcher, practitioner and creator of new ways of entrepreneurial organizing where ecology, society, economy all benefits from and interact seamlessly with each other.

(Elise Talgorn)

Elise Talgorn is Senior Design Strategist at Philips Experience Design, Visiting researcher, Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering, TUDelft

Contributors Biographies

(Bea Xu)

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Bea Xu is a psychic worker, worldbuilder and trainee transpersonal psychotherapist studying at London's CCPE who co-founded sustainable travel platform vojo and ritual lab LUNARCHY 2.0

Co-emerging Economies: Exploring Radical Perspectives On Post-Anthropocentric Economies

Co-emerging Economies ••

• edited by Olga Mink & Reon Brand

Exploring Radical Perspectives on PostAnthropocentric Economies