Lewes Regenerative Community: The Lewes DisCO

PURPOSE & VISION - Why we exist, the purpose we serve and our future potential

Lewes, along with many towns and cities, has largely become gentrified and will continue to do so until systems are in place to challenge this trajectory. Individually this might seem like an insurmountable endeavor but collectively, combining community wealth along with creating structures that enable the investment required to move away from individual ownership, this becomes a distinct and reachable reality. This paradigm shift, a new way of thinking, being and doing, focuses upon community cohesion to build an ecosystem of people and organisations who can cooperate, organise and resource this change through their focus at community level and connection to operational systems that employ economies of scale equitably, opposed to employing extractive means.

This concept is not new, it is not unique and it is not revolutionary. It is, however, a renaissance, a new birth, re-understanding how communities have lived in the past and will live again. We are now aligning ourselves to those life affirming practices as a counter culture to the mainstream. Because we currently have so little time to distill, digest, question and reorganise ourselves, these ways of being appear almost imaginable to become a reality within the British culture. Our identity has been so focused upon who we are as an individual, because that enables and supports a consumerist worldly view, shaping our own belief that the only way is for individuals to have, be and do everything ourselves, that we have lost much of our ability to understand interconnection, interdependence and the value of our ecosystem. Understanding ecosystem feedback loops is akin to a large scale cause and effect social interaction between individuals, we can affect the effect. A simple analogy here would be one of a simple greeting gesture, someone says hello in a particular way and the resulting effect is the reaction to that greeting. Understanding the cause, knowing that all behaviour is communication, is the crux of the issue. Knowing that our body, is an ecosystem in itself, also plays out here. The effect of overloading the body’s ecosystem with endocrine disrupting chemicals or nutrients that create a dysbiosis in our gut microbiome, results in breakdown of the ecosystem function. The effect we see is physiological, bio-mechanical and psychological decline either acute or chronic, depending upon how quickly we might be able to adapt and realign to support a harmonious balance within the our body system. This is where we, as a global ecosystem, find ourselves now, our ecosystem is in acute decline, we have an imbalance and individual organisums are suffering by that imbalance. We are removing habitat at a scale that has never been seen before, we are extracting fossil fuels at an unprecedented rate and we are pumping billions of tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere. We have cut the ability to flow resources to where they are required, instead the resources are being focused upon one specific outcome, the creation of capital.

Why do people work meaningless jobs (Ones that have no benefit for the wider community, and just support the creation and focus of wealth to those who already have the power) These roles have been socially constructed, placing the onus on the individual to create wealth for themselves, and, because otherwise these roles would not exist, profit for the company to extract to their shareholders. Peoples limbic brain has been hijacked and they are in a perpetual state of sympathetic overload, feeding the dopamine and cortisol response. Biologically this is not the main function of this mechanism (sympathetic/parasympathetic). It is incredibly useful in evolutionary terms, and the hijacking has simply made it is easy and, I would argue, convenient for a consumerist worldly view to be reinforced by the simple notion of individual success, of limbic agitation, stimulating a biological response to release cortisol and provide a short term dopamine high.

Individual success alone, is not conducive to large scale interconnected and interdependent ecosystem functions. It is here that this consumerist view must be both challenged, dissected and, for the sake of our existence, totally abandoned.

I would like to draw upon some previous research we undertook in 2021, which considered wellbeing as a relatively and broadly misunderstood concept, with much previous meta research concluding that the term wellbeing is so widely applied that the crux of the interconnected nature of it is misinterpreted and misunderstood. We can look back to research that dissects individualism and note from it that wellbeing is a term that becomes synonymous with community, environment and ecosystem function. It is not a term related to the individual at all and yet because it supports a particular narrative it has been repositioned to identify what the ‘individual’s’ needs are.

Applied wellbeing

When we consider politics, and the notion of individual views, it would seem that the term wellbeing is once again focused upon the individual or the group of individuals who subscribe to a particular set of ideals or principles to which they might like to be governed by. The idea that this way of working supports their ‘wellbeing’ is, once again, flawed by outlining the position that wellbeing has within the community, environmental and ecosystem function. Our simple anthropocentric perspective of wellbeing, placing humans at the heart of the discourse, is so archaic that it is leading to our civilisation collapse.

Applying wellbeing to our operations is to consider the holistic context in which we operate, yes, individual organism needs must be met within that context, but as we understand from Neef’s critique of Maslow, and as our internal struggle to recognise ourselves as interconnected beings is vastly shaped through our socially constructed lens, our needs are interconnected and interactive, opposed to a hierarchy where you must satisfy the base before you move up the pyramid.

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Maslow’s Hierachy pyramid of needs

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Neef’s interconnected taxonomy of needs

The Lewes DisCO is conceptualised as flat structured organisation operating as a DisCO, (Distributed Co-operative), enabling a broad range of participation in the governance of the future operations of the DisCO. The DisCO will bring together a wide community of members who will invest their energy into the operations of the DisCO, bringing skills, knowledge and expertise. The DisCO will enable financial investment to flow to the operations and in return the operations will enable the generation of a community infrastructure that will support all those who are part of the DisCO.

Why are DAO’s, DHO’s and DisCO’s important for this new paradigm?

These new structures are designed to be organised systems that enable all members to be supported by the Cooperative, and provide voice to bring a project to life. Individually a member does not have to be able to enact the whole project but what the set up provides is system and a way to record decision making, much like a peoples assembly enables people to have their say on the project. The project ideas come from all members, opposed to some of the members advocating a particular path. Once the idea has been formulated or articulated by a member, it is then considered through the committee circle that is best placed to work through the ideas merits. These structure invite strategic ideas, discussion around those ideas, then they are brought into action through the interconnected nature of the DisCO.

The founding principles of the DAO, DHO or the DisCo are brought to bare by the founding members but the organisation, as long as the principle value are not eroded, can move in any direction based upon the members proposals.

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Why do we need DisCO?

External market forces are responsible for much of the economic crisis we are currently in the midst of. House, food and fuel prices are no longer controlled by any community, unless they have full ownership of all houses, grow all their food and produce all their energy needs. The centralisation of power and focus to a few organisations to manage infrastructure might have worked when these institutions were part of the commons but, as they are no longer, and as it becomes more apparent that energy resources will have to reduce in the near future, leading to more decentralised control, we are in a time to consider how local governance of resources is managed.

Towns, villages, cities and indeed all manner of communities could control much of their local economy if structures were in place to enable them to do so. The etiology of the word economy comes from the Latin ‘oeconomia’; to manage house and it is the way in which our current economy is implemented that manages to support those who have, while keeping down those who have not. This is why The Lewes DIsCO comes into operation, to mange the house equitably, collectively coming together to support those who wish to be supported and those who wish to be supporting.

The Lewes DisCo is a concept that would enable wide and interconnected support of the entire community, an even distribution of wealth based upon basic needs being met. Let me draw upon a couple of analogy that we can easily digest: Mycelium networks digest a host of material under the ground, it is only when there is a lack of nutrients available that they will snare nematode worms to digest them for their nutrients. These amazing, and still poorly understood, intelligent networks that enable fertile soils are not necessarily seen as a predatory network but, if pushed, they will digest anything they can find, including passing nematodes.

We have a current social system that is pushing people to their limits, we have disaffected groups, criminal gangs and disenfranchised individuals. It would appear to me that, and of course there will be failure, we as a society need to reach out to each other and, like mycelium, distribute our resources across our networks, connecting to other beings and, recognise that if we believe that their is a more equitable way of existing, we must all live it.

Knowing that everyone in the community has eaten, and that we have all helped to enable that to happen, is the social value return that needs to be recognised. Defining what our basic needs are, and then having those met by the community that we are part of, is surely a reason to want to continue to contribute to that community, not simply take from it!

The model, as it develops, will encourage a broader and growing membership through demonstration of function. Simplicity is a key success for this model and it needs to be able to demonstrate a much simpler and easier way of life than we currently have. One such example would be housing. Once housing is owned, there is no reason to charge rent to reside there other than that is what the market enables, those who have are able to have more. This might sound both obvious and ridiculous in the same breath but, let me put it another way. Once someone has paid off a mortgage, they don’t continue to pay out monthly for it but they know that it has a pertained value, one that is currently exchanged for money on the open market, once it is sold.

But what if, instead of money being transacted, there was some community value placed upon the use of that property, that to become a resident one had to commit to contributing to the ongoing functions of the DisCo? That the property then became a value to the community because of its ability to house a critical function of the DisCo, for example, placing value upon growing food and the resident is able to work with the land to produce food for others within the DisCo.

As sites come to market and buildings become empty and unused, the DisCo requires the flexibility to mobilise resources to buy, repurpose and bring into community ownership, locked away from the market and focused upon providing what community needs, opposed to what the market determines.

Affordability is at the heart of this need. Retail, housing, energy, transport and food are all controlled by market forces. The spaces they operate from are privately owned and demand the market value for the use of those spaces. But what if there was an alternative. What if houses, spaces, land were owned by the town? The town could create an internal micro market, affordable, flexible and fit for purpose. Charge to use spaces could be seen through a different lens, a lens of nature. Once sites are owned and as long as they are used to benefit the wider community, there is a question of if any change would need to be made at all? The services that operate from those sites could then be realigned to be regenerative, supportive of our ecosystem rather than destroying it.

Creating a circular economy needs to first consider the existing linear operations, then, once that is understood, create an alternative that curves into circularity.

A circular economy with multiple trading currencies

Our current economy is simplified to monetary trading terms of GBP £, with our economic ‘output; measured as Gross Domestic Product (GDP) . There have been various calls to change the way in which we ‘measure’ the output of countries and, for example a wellbeing based economic output would look very different from our current status. Increasing current GDP output fails to attribute any value to the ecosystem and, as we are well aware, the destruction of our ecosystem is as a result of our human endeavors to be productive.

Informally, people operate with multiple trading currencies, one example being inter-relational. Why people want to spend time with each other could be to do with monetary worth but, I would suggest, that if this is the case, it is not people they wish to spend time with, it’s what the money is able to provide. A more humanist conceptualisation here would be that people want to spend time with each other because of how they make each other feel, each of us therefore develop our own emotional economy with others. It is nothing to do with money, but how we are able to form connections with others, both human and non.

Money, I would like to position, is a disease to the wider ecosystem that we exist within. It is destroying a balance and bringing various forms of destruction, inequality and unjust outcomes to a world that would flourish without it in its current form. Money has become synonymous with greed and I would suggest this is an outcome of our current economic practices, not the cause. If we value someone or something simply by monetary value, of course a perception of increasing the value would result. This cup is worth ‘X’ and this cup is worth ‘2X’ how does that take into account of the relational materiality or indeed the agentic materiality ( Barrad) of the cup. The cup has no objective value, that is absurd, the cup does however pertain a particular subjective value, based upon how it sits (relational) and interacts (agentic) with its environment. It might for someone be priceless, and for someone else be poorly priced. However, the point in question is that for both cups, their monetary value, is being made up, based upon cost of production, supply and market desirability, therefore the higher the monetary value of said cups is realised as a positive outcome.

Moving away from money as a transactional currency

Eradicating disease, that ultimately lead to the destruction of an ecosystem or breakdown of an organism, is not necessarily about making it extinct but is more about creating balance, so that a symbiotic relationship can continue, the disease is no longer classified as disease but as a manageable part of the ecosystem. We need to bring the current monetary systems back to this state.

There are many such relationships in our ecosystem and if we turn to our own complex internal organism, which we call the human body, we will understand that we are an organism made from trillions of bacteria and cells that collaborate to become organs, viruses, bacterial phages; who’s role it is to modify the viruses, creating a balance. We also understand that when we have a disbiosis (an unbalanced microbiome), we are presented with breakdown of ecosystem function - the body no longer can control levels of sugar in the blood; the wall of our intestine can not repair itself and we suffer ‘leaky gut syndrome’, leading to an auto immune response; there is insufficient creation of serotonin, which impacts our mood; the ability to inhibit Grehlin production, leading to continual feeling of hunger, is suppressed and, indeed, a majority of disease; cardio-vascular, auto-immune, respiratory, cellular, cognitive are becoming widely understood to be triggered by a breakdown of our internal ecosystem.

The control of money has been largely left to private entities who simply want to make more money, to develop their perceived worth. This is like flooding our bodies with a particular bacteria, it builds and builds, suppressing all other forms of bacteria and restricting their functions until, ultimately destruction of the entire ecosystem. What value is that bacteria bringing when it is left to self manage its supply and demand? There is no balance because their is no value, their is literally no value in our current monetary system other than if you can make more of it. This is why bankers are paid more than educators of children, it is, once again, absurd to consider that just working to make more money is of more value than educating our children.

So, moving this concept to a economic level, one would consider that our economic value, worth, input and output should be based upon the value that we place on nurturing our relational and agentic connections with each other and the environment around us. If we perceive a simplistic notion of ourselves, detached from everything around us, it is easy to understand that an anthropocentric construct, such as money, is a way to interact, to gain and pass value but that does not take any consideration of the complexity of our interrealtionality (how our interdependence is enacted), it is simply a linear construct based upon achievement, you achieve, you have more, you create value and therefore are recognised as being worth something.

This construct is perpetuated throughout our schooling system, and indeed it is baked into some school visions and values, derived from a not so distant past (47BC), attributed to Julius Caeser: ‘vini, vedi, veci’ I came, I saw, I conquered. This implies that there is some achievement in conquering and is mistakenly applied throughout our matrix of assessment, performance and output of school, college, university, work, life... What we are achieving, is of course, the main tenant of this position. We find ourselves in the midst of multiple crisis, civilisation collapse, mass extinction and ecosystem breakdown as a direct consequence of human endeavor to achieve, to be more, to conquer: to increase our worth by a simplistic anthroprocentic construct, money.

Our value system needs to change and, I would suggest that money might not be the best way to change that. It might have a place within the system but there also has to be a transactional relationship that places value at the heart of the transaction not simply a cost. The development of digital technologies has a place to play here. It is a space where it is now possible for organisations to hold their own digital wallets and move value in and out of them. It also means that those wallets no longer have to hold Fiat currency, they can hold digital tokens that can have various forms of value attributed to them. For example, an organisation might have a token that is based upon gratitude. It is passed from organisaiton to organisaiton based upon how helpful the organisation has been, and therefore by proxy, how helpful the individuals who make up the organisaiton have been. There is of course, a trap here and, for those who have already realised it, why is that any different to the current game we play with organisaitons? It concerns being helpful or useful and what pressures there are being placed by the organisation in question to ensure that individuals appear to be helpful and useful when actually they just need your business, or, they need your gratitude.

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