Table of contents
Kernel is, first and foremost, a community of human beings trying to learn together about how to make money more habitable; or how to change our habitual ways of relating to money. This is a critical fulcrum in the work to create a more wholesome web, or to reclaim our time, or to recover more resilient, healthy identities and means of identifying what is important in a given context.
Doing this requires the production of many works of art. These works are both projects, businesses, protocols, and products that operate in and with the world; just as they are human selves on the eternal journey of being true to who they are. Both kinds of artwork are necessary. Their combination requires bridging the market and the gift.
As Jonathan Lethem says in his beautifully plagiarized essay The Ecstasy of Influence:
"One of the more difficult things to comprehend is that the gift economies — like those that sustain open-source software — coexist so naturally with the market. It is precisely this doubleness in art practices that we must identify, ratify, and enshrine in our lives as participants in culture, either as “producers” or “consumers.” Art that matters to us — which moves the heart, or revives the soul, or delights the senses, or offers courage for living, however we choose to describe the experience — is received as a gift is received. Even if we’ve paid a fee at the door of the museum or concert hall, when we are touched by a work of art something comes to us that has nothing to do with the price. The daily commerce of our lives proceeds at its own constant level, but a gift conveys an uncommodifiable surplus of inspiration."
There's a wonderful story about Alan Watts asking Joseph Campbell, "What's your yoga?" to which Campbell replied, "My yoga is underlining sentences." You won't find a single novel idea in everything that lies before you: all of it has been lifted, copied, remixed; all so that it may be re-cognised. As such, reading Kernel will always be free. It exists in multiple media, and can be approached through video, or song, or poetry, as well as through the prose presented on this website.
Lethem again:
"Any text is woven entirely with citations, references, echoes, cultural languages, which cut across it through and through in a vast stereophony. The citations that go to make up a text are anonymous, untraceable, and yet already read; they are quotations without inverted commas. The kernel, the soul — let us go further and say the substance, the bulk, the actual and valuable material of all human utterances — is plagiarism. For substantially all ideas are secondhand, consciously and unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources, and daily used by the garnerer with a pride and satisfaction born of the superstition that he originated them; whereas there is not a rag of originality about them anywhere except the little discoloration they get from his mental and moral caliber and his temperament, and which is revealed in characteristics of phrasing."
The above quote is as good a description of my writing process as any I have ever come across. I was quite consciously doing exactly this for at least a decade before I wrote the first version of Kernel. Kernel has since been rewritten again and again by virtue of the many amazing, contradictory, loving voices who have participated in its ongoing remaking.
It is. commons on the sense that Lethem describes, and one that many of us care to protect. We do this not just because of certain principles, lovingly held, but because it is, in Lethem's words, "a practical necessity".
"Artists and their surrogates who fall into the trap of seeking recompense for every possible second use end up attacking their own best audience members [...] for the crime of responding with the same mixture of intoxication, resentment, lust, and glee that characterizes all artistic successors. By doing so they make the world smaller, betraying what seems to me the primary motivation for participating in the world of culture in the first place: to make the world larger."
Kernel is not a community. The word "community" has been stripped bare by those who place possessive pronouns before it, like "our" community, or "my" community, or "your" community. Kernel is not an enclosure. The whole idea is to leave to Kernel. If you do not, Kernel is not successful as an educational environment. You must graduate!
Kernel cultivates, and cares for, culture. It does so quietly, over much longer cycles than markets create, and destroy, money. Cultures are crafted through ritual and tradition, and we have ours: horizontal conversation, specifically designed gatherings, a penchant for particular sorts of music at the beginning of virtual calls, and many more beside.
We are not unique. We are not the first, nor the last. We are not heroes, martyrs, saviours, victims, tyrants, magicians, kings, queens, warriors, wanderers, orphans, lovers, tricksters, or fools; though we acknowledge all of these archetypes within us and give them a seat at wisdom's table. We are not who you think we are; just as you are not who you think you are.
Like all truly inspired people, we are not possesors:
"The world of art and culture is a vast commons, one that is salted through with zones of utter commerce yet remains gloriously immune to any overall commodification. The closest resemblance is to the commons of a language: altered by every contributor, expanded by even the most passive user. That a language is a commons doesn’t mean that the community owns it; rather it belongs between people, possessed by no one, not even by society as a whole."