Prisma Docs

In this section, we surface the most relevant systemic challenges our work responds to, giving the reader a frame of reference for what follows. We interpret the underlying pattern across these dimensions as a restrained communication bandwidth between capital and grassroots innovation. The protocol introduced by this paper directly addresses that communication capacity.

We move through three phases to set the context: first, the epistemic root; second, what this means, practically; and, third, context related specifically to protocol development.

Epistemically: Worldview & Observation

We recognise the present moment, on a planetary scale, as one where western hegemonic¹ rationalising and centralisation of power has created corporate-political institutions² that are entrenched in a paradigm of separation.³ We recognise these structures influence narratives⁴ and capital allocation disproportionately and often in direct contradiction to the wills of everyday people. These structures demonstrate insufficient levels of capacity for empathy and evolution to effectively respond to increasingly volatile environmental conditions, which, ironically, are also the by-products of their own conquests.⁵ Whilst these entities are locked into the race to extract, accumulate and consume, grassroots innovators struggle to find project viability before becoming re-absorbed into the patterning⁶ and conditioning of the order they were originally trying to disrupt. That is to say, we recognise the need to de-couple venture development from the globalising imperative for constant financial growth,⁷ whilst simultaneously shifting the lens of value towards seeing life-centric economy. ⁸

Such a moment can only continue to exist from within a dominant worldview that normalises the denial of other realities, for the sake of efficiency and more comfortable versions of progress. When there is a fear of reflection,⁹ assumptions remain unquestioned, and a finite sub-set of realities are repeatedly enforced, most usually in favour of prevailing power structures. These dynamics can be seen as an unnecessarily constrained communication bandwidth, that requires the flattening of complexity in order to be heard, most usually at the cost of the agency of the majority. This limits the capacity for systemic apprehension, innovation,¹⁰ and effective response, leading to increasingly convergent pathways of economy and governance, reduced adaptability and systemic fragility. ¹¹ ¹²

This worldview continually re-affirms the likelihood of systemic crises¹³, with exponentially escalating effects, and the desperate need for urgent solution. In reality, there exists a plenitude of alternative ways of seeing, containing a multitude of possible futures within them: futures that remember how to value life. This planetary-moment signals an important message: choosing to be in relationship with this plurality of ways of seeing, to actively cultivate greater capacity for life to express itself, is not only possible, it’s fundamentally non-negotiable.

Practically: Organisation

This section speaks to three patterns of existing capital systems, in order to distinguish the space this protocol aims to open up.

Learning and Story speaks to the pattern of incomplete representation of value.
Experimentation and Events addresses the imperative for constant growth.
Organisational Capacity and Venture Development responds to the totalising extent of financialization.

Learning and Story

With this worldview, many generations have turned away from the intention to learn how to steward life in order to grow vast systems of private accumulation.¹⁴ These systems must now learn how to develop the necessary capacities to enable the realisation of life-affirming futures. There are many practices of systems-change offering ways to grow those enabling capabilities.¹⁵ However, it’s often difficult to maintain a complete representation of the value created as a result of working on whole-system transformation,¹⁶ ¹⁷ due to the loss of context, and even more difficult to translate that into a form that legacy systems can easily interpret. Part of how we aim to address this challenge is with what we call the ‘Story-Publishing Stack’ (or just Publishing Stack). This is introduced as part of our event-organising infrastructure in the section Methodology. We intentionally employ Story¹⁸ as the language to refer to the multi-layered, multi-perspectival communication required to account of systems evolution.

Experimentation and Events

Standing on this foundation of privatisation, capital oriented toward constant growth (including debt as well as equity returns) requires constant performance,⁷ and is structurally incompatible with the cyclical and often unpredictable nature of living systems. So normalised is this particular economic order that many have had their agency arrested¹⁹ by a manufactured² sense of its inevitability. Whilst some find ways to numb and forget the despair, generations of leaders, convinced of their assumptions and dissociated from the realities their decisions effect,²⁰ find ways to artificially stimulate further economic growth beyond natural limits.²¹

Prisma is a response to the purpose of making visible how systems-change practice takes shape when applied on-the-ground, in order for the practice itself to be able to evolve, thus, enabling systems to be worked on at increasing orders of capability. We intentionally centre on events to ensure the work stays grounded in reality, and in order to protect against recreating a constant-growth relationship to the initiatives developed. In this way, the system is given an innate periodicity, fundamentally orienting activity towards experimentation and experiential learning via participation, as opposed to constant growth.

We expand more on these events in the sections Methodology and Past Work. At the core, they are a way to envision system evolution with multiple stakeholders, whilst leading up to an in-person intensive. During the intensive, the aim is to realise that evolved state, by embodying new expressions of organising, coordinating with the practices that would be required for that system state to come into being. The intensives can last up to multiple weeks. Event organising is a process of creating a container for social innovation, and it’s from within these containers that new forms of organisation can emerge.

Organisational Capacity and Venture Development

Part of what can make envisioning alternative futures so difficult is the totalising extent to which the logic of today’s dominant economic order intermediates many cultures, on both a somatic and memetic level (body and mind, respectively).²² We require a way to invite unlikely expressions of new possibilities, opening up pathways across a transition space from what is to what could be. ²³ ²⁴ Transformation cannot be scripted, but we can do our best to intentionally try on new shapes²⁵ and participate in emergence.

This is fundamentally an organising capacity and it is for this reason that we position Prisma within the field of Venture Development, actively addressing the development of capacity for new forms of organisation. Ventures, in the context of our work, are defined as expressions of emergent and aligned collective action. Facilitating the formation of these expressions is the role of Enaction process-design, and we detail this further in the section Methodology.

Implementation: Value and Infrastructure

Value-Perspectives and Digital Currency

Evaluation is required in order to be able to learn from how practice applied in a real-world context takes effect. We interpret evaluation to mean the movement of value: value flows.²⁶ In our work, value is defined by the communities in which the events are hosted. Practically, this means communities define what is a meaningful indicator of positive contribution toward ecosystemic health. This place-sourced¹⁸ attribution necessarily creates a hyper-differentiated field of value. Value flows are currencies: current-sees.²⁷ Therefore, learning is a perspective into value, taking shape practically as a perspective into a currency-space.²⁸

In this way, we can further clarify the concept of an action-learning incubator with the context introduced so far. It is the process of forming organisations of participatory action, from within experimental spaces aiming to realise life-centric futures, that learn and evolve by being able to see how their contributions effect regionally-relevant values-systems.

Existing Funding Limitations and Protocol

The challenge we address with the development of the protocol is a way to represent the value created by these actions as parts of one whole, to enable network liquidity and coordination. In order to do that we require a unified, underlying accounting system that can convert project-specific currencies into network-wide contribution signals without flattening the value plurality from which they originate.

Preserving value plurality within a unified accounting substrate unlocks the possibility for intricate capital redistribution strategies, whilst simplifying funder engagement to a single, action-backed financial instrument.

Gramsci ↩
Chomsky ↩ ↩²
Regenesis, Báyò Akómoláfé, Culture Hack Labs and Ontologies of Separation ↩
Narrative-based systems-change: Culture Hack Labs ↩
Degrowth ↩
Bateson, Varela ↩
Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View ↩ ↩²
Implicitly, we employ a living systems perspective into economy, as distinct from the Marx-Smith dualism some readers may be accustomed to, although the critiques of today’s capital systems do still draw from these lineages. ↩
Delfina Terrado ↩
Graeber (Graeber-Thiel debate) ↩
Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, University of Cambridge ↩
Global Governance Futures ↩
Daniel Schmachtenberger ↩
Message from the Kogi people (taking without return) ↩
Introduce the practice sector. Refer to lineages. Discern living systems from systems. ↩
Sam Buckton, Twelve principles for transformation-focussed evaluation ↩
Deep Wealth, Meta-Currency project ↩
Regenesis, Story of Place, Awareness-based systems-change ↩ ↩²
Báyò Akómoláfé ↩
Bioregionalism is an organising principle which advocates for using ecological patterns as a guide for scale-appropriate governance. ref ↩
Lenin, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism ↩
Alnoor Ladha ↩
Culture Hack Labs, Territories of Transition, Ontological Shift , Post-Capitalist Philanthropy ↩
Three-horizons framework ↩
Sofie Strand, Sounds of SAND ↩
Valueflows, Haugen, B. & Foster, L. ↩
MetaCurrency, Arthur Brock ↩
Holochain whitepaper v2.0 ↩