Kernel has, over the years in which we have hosted it, developed a very particular educational philosophy. We will invite you to consider it with us at the end of the course. Right now, though, we wish to expand on a specific phrase from the previous brief: “architectures of participation”.

There’s so much to notice about this strange phrase that Matt Webb uses to describe what any protocol really is. When we put it together with Andreas Antonopoulos’ insight that Bitcoin is the first network-centric protocol for money, it gets even weirder, because–for the first time in living memory–the architectures that invite our participation in the phenomenon of money are open and permissionless. They are not owned by anyone.

The power and the irony of this kind of ownerless architecture is that it–of necessity–merges free expression with economic value, so while anyone may participate, doing so meaningfully (that is, having any transaction/speech-act you make be heard/recorded by the peer-to-peer network) requires that you already have some token.

We often struggle to see how this power and the architectural irony it arises from are inseparable. Those who do see how inseparable power and irony are struggle to accept this inevitability, because we are often still trapped in moral arguments about whether blockchains are good or bad. Meanwhile, the unacknowledged ironies are manipulated to concentrate power even more than centralized systems, whose administrators are at least elected or legally accountable, if not both.

If we can move beyond right or wrong, good or bad, we might see that the word “architecture” has a beautiful meaning: it is “the art or science of building; specifically: the art or practice of designing and building structures and especially habitable ones.”

Instead of getting stuck in moral pronouncements, Kernel encourages you to look deeply at both the art and science of building. We will focus these entwined, inseparable investigations through the lens of a very simple question: “How can we make money more habitable?”

In some deep sense, that is all money has ever been: a habit. It is a habituated way of valuing things in the world, of reducing the overwhelm we are faced with in each moment to something which our limited minds can grasp, and so share or exchange with others more easily. It often defines how we see our work and our worth in the world, and so it becomes our internal habit: literally the clothes we wear which affect our inner perception of who we really are.

There are, of course, well-defined and well-trodden paths around this kind of habituation. But Kernel is not a course on renunciation, or meditation, or prayer, or selfless service (though you will find aspects of all of those threaded through it).

Rehabilitating money isn’t about choosing any one network or technology and treating it as a saviour. It’s about noticing which paradoxes any particular architectural choice introduces and then learning how to live beautifully with them through the application of artistic science and scientific artwork.

In our particular case, rehabilitating money in the context of open and permissionless, network-centric protocols means forging paths through the irony that anyone can speak on these networks, though it requires that you already have tokens in order for your meaning to be recorded by all participants. More specifically, it means forging paths in ways which neither concentrate power nor undo the unification of speech and money, hence the need for true art.

What exactly do these paths look like? There have been some attempts at “gas tokens”, relayers, “pay masters”, or burner wallets that come preloaded with coins of various kinds. None of them seem particularly satisfactory, which is the point about architectural ironies. We cannot resolve them: there is no one solution which will make this “problem” go away, apart from adopting an entirely different architecture, which inevitably creates new and different ironies.

However, while there is no easy resolution at hand, no saviour (man or machine), there is the invitation to design and build beautiful lives within the constraints of our chosen habits and habitations.

The first element required to do this is simply to realise that your habits are chosen, and to accept both the freedom and responsibility implicit in this recognition. The next is to understand, deeply, why we chose any one habit over any other, without falling into the easy, default mode of thinking that says one is good and another bad, or one is right and another wrong. Sincerely undertaken, these two elements are designed to drive the mind into the heart, such that you live with both of them open to the beauty and the pain, the power and the irony of living, here and now.

You might notice that we’re talking about paths and architectures, in order to properly respect the plurality embedded in Matt’s phrase. Kernel is not about one architecture, it is about architectures of participation, just as it is really about rehabilitating monies, not money. The shift to a plural form is the first step in the long, generational work with which we are engaged.

In this spirit, we’ll look briefly at two pieces which have to do specifically with architectures: Bauhaus and Christopher Alexander.

Bauhaus Curriculum

Learn

Building Beauty

Carefully

Our educational method aims for many of the same principles as Bauhaus did, emphasising:

Much like the Bauhaus curriculum, one of the core functions of the Kernel book is to “liberate participants by breaking down conventional patterns of thought in order to make way for personal experiences and discoveries which will enable you to see your own potentialities and limitations.”

In its ideal form, any training we offer “opens the way for the creative powers of the individual, establishing a basis on which different individuals can cooperate without losing their artistic [and scientific] independence.”

Most importantly, Kernel aims to establish a theory of habitable money that actually corresponds to the worlds we might create together, just as Walter Gropius established a theory of art and mass manufacturing in the early 20th Century. This is a critical matter, because

Gropius also wrote that:

What is the principal theme? Certainly, we are looking to build more habitable forms of money, but habitations vary greatly. Our suggestion is that worthwhile paths through the irony which do not centralize power will not be especially utilitarian: that is, they will not aim for the greatest good for the greatest number, or to “onboard the next billion”.

The principal theme of a coherent theory of habitable money that corresponds to the worlds we might actually build together is beauty. Specifically, it is the kind of beauty that incites joy. Gropius writes:

To understand how beauty emerges from our architectures in such a way that it incites joy–and not just joy in myself as the maker, but joy in us as the community who participates in making any given space what it is–we turn to Christopher Alexander.

There is so much to learn here, so we will simply quote three of the principles of Building Beauty which most clearly reveal the principal theme we are trying to enunciate in our theory of more habitable monies.

There is a common thread that runs through all of Alexander’s work: the beauty you can make is both a reflection of the beauty you have already discovered within and the fine-tuning of that self-same process of discovery. That is, it is not just that you need to be beautiful within to make truly beautiful things; making beautiful things–when done in this adaptive and transformative manner–helps you discover the beauty you already embody. The two are in constant dialogue, for beauty rests below your inner horizons and beyond your outer ones. Tuning in to that conversation is an act of spirit, and it requires both humility and skill.

This is why Kernel is the way it is. A theory of habitable money that corresponds to the worlds we might build together in beautiful ways cannot only include technical directions, or only what is now called monetary theory, or only what we currently think of as economics, politics, and philosophy. It must, of necessity, be as intersectional as the medium in which we hope to construct better homes and habits for ourselves along with what and who we really value.

Unlike Bauhaus, Kernel is not a movement. Kernel is not the revolutionary vanguard. Kernel is barely even a community, in the sense that that word is often used.

Kernel is powerless. Kernel cannot do anything about how you interpret the content presented here or who you choose to discuss it with, or how you choose to host those discussions. Kernel is a mystery. And not in the sense of some secret and elite “mystery school” which, if you could just learn the right incantations or passphrases, you’d be granted access to. Kernel is most mysterious to those who actually participate in its chosen and contradictory architectures.

In this sense, our theory–just like the principal theme which runs through it–cannot come to a neat conclusion. It is open-ended, ongoing, ironic, sincere, adaptive, transforming always to the times in which it is expressed. Instead, we will leave off here with something more invitational than a conclusion, namely; a blessing.

May you be entrusted with the gift
of verifying for yourself what this all means.
May you come to know your limits
and, in accepting their wisdom,
realise the boundlessness you are.
May you forgive yourself, freely.

May you make money once more
the medicine it has always been,
realising the immediate relationship between
as its true nature, not some objective measure
man has made in his own image.

May you be a signatory on a whole, shared book
rather than an owner of bits.
May you remember that, yes, we were here, too,
in this weird place, and here we danced, too,
the people healing dance. Yes, yes,
we were here, too.
May you remember.

May you be invited into the great play,
this infinite game in which we all participate
and may you move beautifully within it,
just as it moves beautifully within you.
May you, by grace, know when to stop.

May the depth of time in you,
and the vast expanse out there
come to meet in your heart's mirror.
May you find The Friend, right now,
and may this priceless moment
ground you and protect you from greed.

May the thanks you give prepare you
to receive the generosity embedded in your life
so that faith blooms in this already enough-ness,
this overwhelmingly simple abundance,
this lively exchange of one
unthinkable love.