The SheFi Manifesto
Sometimes the stars ask us to take a deeper dive into the nature of things – to question the foundations of our world and our institutions.
How would the goddess organize our world? Goddesses have no interest in centralized systems of power, we don’t worship the phallus, nor some human instantiation of the phallus. We do not worship one god, nor one president, nor one corporation, nor do we pay fealty to such organs. We reject centralized power. When we have a problem that needs to be resolved we do it friend to friend, person to person, peer to peer, goddess to goddess. Hierarchy is not a framework for solving problems, it is a framework for creating problems.
This is true in all manifestations of power. Centralized power has given us wars and famine, disease and ruin, genocide and despair. This is the true legacy of Emperors and kings, warlords and despots, presidents, premiers and dear leaders. It is the sad flotsam from wreckage of kingdoms great nation states. Concentrations of power lead to oppression.
Goddess thus seek distributed power. The art of medicine should not be solely in the hands of large corporations, so we seek traditional cures and methods and reacquaint our friends and sisters with these methods, thus sharing the knowledge and distributing the power to heal.
So too in art, we have worked to dismantle the great powers of the art world and place the power to curate and display art to the neighborhood, and we organize by networks, not placing decisions in the hands of a select few.
But despite the strides we have made in the realms of politics and healing, spiritual growth and art, there remain important sectors of our lives where centralized power controls all. There is no better example of this than our financial systems.
We live in a world in which anything involving money or value, or honestly even trust, is placed in a centralized, indeed phallocentric, institution. We don’t exchange money person to person, but our money passes through our banks, through JP Morgan Chase or through Paypal. We surrender to these institutions the right to verify what we own, whether we can share our wealth with our friends, etc. So too we trust centralized centers of powers to control the movement of all our assets via stock exchanges, or to manage our pensions, or to tell us whether we actually own our homes and our cars and to tell us how much money we owe and when it needs to be paid.
But it doesn’t need to be this way.
The goddesses have given us a new answer – a strategy for taking control of our own wealth, for allowing us to exchange wealth person to person without the mediation of centralized powers. A strategy that can allow trust to be shared and distributed and not placed in the hands of a single power.
And what is this new strategy, this new technology that the goddesses have blessed us with? Well it is the invention of blockchain technology by Satoshi Nakamoto, and the subsequent extension of that technology to the realms of money and finance, transfers of wealth and proof of ownership. No longer do we allow a handful of power sources to control these vital functions. These vital functions can be shared between us.
And what is the secret to this technology? The secret is transparency. The secret is sharing. The secret is immutability. The secret is beauty.
Imagine a ledger that is not housed in a bank, under the control of corporate tyrants but shared by everyone in the world. If I give money to you, it is recorded on a ledger that is shared throughout the world. I have it. You have it. Our sisters in Istanbul and Iceland, Antarctica and Ecuador all have access to the ledger. The same ledger.
And how do we know that we all have the same ledger? Because of the other gift of technos – the gift of cryptography. Every 10 minutes all transactions are frozen into a block, in deed a block of blocks, recording every transaction from the dawn of the ledger. And cryptographic proofs give us a hash – a simple and beautiful string of numbers that can tell us if one element of our shared ledger has been tampered with.
Gone are the days of seedy bankers fudging with accounts. That is a thing of the past. The ledger is the ledger. It is our ledger. And we trust it because we trust crypto and we trust math, and not because we trust some bald man sitting behind a desk at JP Morgan Chase.
Our story of the shared ledger is the story of Bitcoin – the original shared immutable ledger – but the story does not end there. The goddesses have shown us how computer programs and contracts (smart contracts) can be placed on the blockchain. We don’t need to trust lawyers and governments to ensure that contracts are properly executed, they are on the chain. Immutable. There for all to see. They are there on what Camilla Russo has called the Infinite Machine.
But with smart contracts comes the greatest gift of all – distributed Finance. DeFi. Or better, SheFi? And what is SheFi? It is the liberation of actions like lending and borrowing, creating derivative assets, arbitrage and the like. It is liberating those core elements of our financial system from banks and hedge funds and other centralized forms of power, and placing them in the hands of us, armed with our smart contract, to loan and borrow without fear of predatory institutions. The rules are written in the blockchain. The contract is written in the blockchain, and it tells us what will happen when, and it assures us that the contract will execute when it is supposed to.
And what do we gain from this decentralization of finance? Everything. Centralized banks and insurance companies and hedge funds have amassed enormous sums of capital and put that capital to ill use. It has deployed that capital to support endless wars and merchants of war. It has deployed that capital to prop up carbon bubble industries and other industries that rape and pillage the planet and which are only viable because of the support of these centralized pools of money.
But now let’s imagine a world in which we don’t centralize financial power. Let’s imagine a world in which insurance contracts are decentralized and borrowing and lending is decentralized, in which investments are decentralized. Let’s imagine a world in which even centralized powers no longer control giant pools of money. Let’s imagine a world in which the critical function of trust returns to us. Imagine.
This then is our manifesto. Trust belongs in the hands of each and every one of us, not in the hands of giant centralized institutions. Wealth, and its transfer, finance and its benefits can be executed peer to peer and in distributed markets. This is the gift the goddesses have given us. It is the gift of a new world, free of patriarchal control over our money and our lives, and a world in which we control and share our own wealth, friend to friend and sister to sister.
