✨ Become a founding member to access my online courses, including Jurassic Worlding and How To Live In The Future
✨ Browse and buy the books we mention on the show at Bookshop.org
✨ Stream and download my music at artist-owned (!) Subvert.fm
✨ Learn about Atlas Research Group, my new team building sovereign infrastructure for social coherence and collective intelligence
In the last episode, my conversation with C. Thi Nguyen explored “value capture”: his term for what happens when our scoring systems define what we care about and ultimately our identities. In this episode, we ask what it means to reverse this process — what you might call “value emancipation” — with Andrea Farias (LinkedIn), a Barcelona-based researcher and builder whose guiding mission to is to support the transition to a regenerative civilization aligned with the flows of our planet.
Andrea investigates how digital technologies can accelerate this transition, crafting information ecosystems that reimagine knowledge creation and resource allocation. She is a Bioregional Knowledge Commoning Fellow at r3.0 and currently works at ReFi Barcelona, Altiplano Estepario, and the Bioregional Weaving Labs Collective, designing financial strategies that strengthen landscape-scale collaboration.
But her path to this life required some serious unlearning and a rocky road out of her prior incarnation as a healthcare tech product strategist.
We invite you to ask the same questions she did, and which we ask in this conversation:
• When I decouple from the desires I’ve identified with, what is worth taking their place?
• How do we design and adopt technologies from this new, more spacious identity?
• How does the local determination of plural value help us restore necessary context to human-scale decision-making?
• How do we navigate the tensions between the place-ful realm of community and the placeless realm of global coordination?
• Where do we need friction in our digital lives, and how can ecology and bioregionalism inspire visions for a better Web?
• What does it mean to be “local to an idea or a narrative” and how does that cyber-locality interface with geographic locality?
• Where do we still want abstraction for coordination at scale?
Tune in for a deep dialogue on how to care for the processes that actually create life — and what it means to enact regenerative principles to personal and collective health, technology and economy.
(Fun fact: although she wasn’t at the time of this recording, Andrea is now a member of Atlas Research Group! So we will definitely be doing more together…)
Special Announcement
Join me at the Weirdosphere online learning platform for “Transcendence in the Age of AI” — where we’re hosting an interactive screening of Steven Spielberg’s A.I. (2001) on June 23rd and chasing it on June 25th with a deep-cut conversation between myself and two wonderful writers and film-makers: Weird Studies co-host JF Martel and Joel Gunz of Macguffin Media. Fresh ideas guaranteed! The viewing party is free to all; the follow-up dialogue and group discussion is $20 USD.
Register here. Founding Members on Substack and Patreon can join for free, as always! Reach out if you are one and would like the free registration link.
Chapters
00:00 Replacing Habits With Values
01:47 Introduction
05:39 Job Creation vs. Job Destruction
08:04 Enoughness & Bigger Desires Than “More”
11:00 Andrea’s Story of Crisis & Transformation
23:04 Limits, Care, & Post-Growth
30:44 Bioregionalism, Currency, And Web3
40:40 Tokenization Tradeoffs
42:09 Governance Starts Local
44:42 Rewilding Digital Biomes
49:42 The Fractal Cozy Web
55:29 AI Translation And Legibility
01:04:48 Bioregional Finance Experiments
01:11:16 Protocols, Enforcement, & Values
01:25:18 Closing & Thanks
Mentions
Andrea’s Website (which may not work; she’s extremely busy doing real stuff)
Andrea’s Substack (which is fallow due to aforementioned real stuff but maybe a surge of new followers will inspire her to publish more of her excellent writing here)
Kate Raworth - Doughnut Economics
Jack D. Forbes - Indigenous Spirituality & Ethos
Yancey Strickler - Postcapitalism for Realists
The Consilience Project - Technology is Not Values Neutral: Ending the Reign of Nihilistic Design
Henry’s Zoo - The Limits and “Good” of Public Goods
James Bridle - Ways of Being
Curt Doty
Sarah Boisvert
Martin Buber
Rubina Cohen
Rebecca Solnit
