Lorenzo Patuzzo
Watch the livestreamThe talk opens deep in time: our line splits from the other apes, we learn to keep fire, and then comes the real leap. Not tools, but language, and with it shared belief. Myths, gods, money, and law are things we all agree to treat as real, and that shared fiction is what lets strangers cooperate in the millions. It is the thread the whole talk follows.
Roughly 12,000 years ago, agriculture produces surplus, and surplus buys specialisation: people freed from growing food to make, trade, teach, and govern. Cities and centralised organisations follow. Writing arrives around 5,000 years ago as memory kept outside the head. Then, as Rome falls, the monasteries hold: from about 500 to 1200 their scriptoria copy and keep the books alive. Science emerges around 1500, and by 1789 the printing press has matured into a force that spreads ideas fast enough to help topple a monarchy.
Every jump in how we share knowledge has cut both ways. Modern communications connect the whole species at once, and the same channels carry misinformation and the deliberate manipulation of cultures. The tool that lets us coordinate is the tool that lets us be captured.
The frontier the talk points to: a species that can actually see itself. Who are we, what do we want, what are our resources, what is happening, who is deciding? And, past seeing, acting together. The early forms are already here, in three layers. Online: Wikipedia, peer-to-peer, open source on GitHub. Infrastructure: Bitcoin. Physical: fablabs. Commons that no single owner controls.
The core proposal. When the centre fails, small, grounded communities carry the flame, as the monasteries did. A 21st-century version needs seven properties: value alignment and devotion; clear rules and discipline; knowledge; a multidisciplinary breadth; a semi-permeable membrane, open enough to teach and host, closed enough to hold its culture; local support and teaching; and pilgrims who travel between them.
The concept, already running. Founded in Barcelona in 2017, AKASHA Hub is self-funded and community-run on a small yearly membership, with no strings from public money. Two warehouses in the El Clot neighbourhood hold a wood and metal workshop, a biological garden, and co-working. The scriptorium, the garden, and the workshop of a monastery, reincarnated: research and innovation clusters, worldwide connection, state-of-the-art work, and local application.
One hub is not enough. The close is federation: sister hubs woven together by shared protocols, so knowledge is global and production stays local, and no single site can be captured or made to fail. Bauwens calls it hubs 'federated into something like an order'. Lorenzo's federation, initiated from AKASHA Hub Barcelona, is the Pulsin Network, the new name for what has run so far as the Hubs Network.