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VILLAGE POWER

Another kind of wealth — and an invitation to the freedom technology community

The proposition

For the last 4 months I was staying in a Fijian village where I encountered what I’m calling Village Power which holds forms of wealth that modern economies struggle to measure including:

land, food, shelter, family, practical knowledge, relationships, time, mutual support and a culture of giving.

And I think there may be an interesting opportunity here for people working on financial freedom, Bitcoin/BSV, Monero, peer-to-peer exchange, privacy technology, open-source software and decentralised systems.

Both an opportunity to bring technology to the village and an opportunity to experience another form of freedom firsthand.

There’s a very real opportunity to experience land custodianship which is different to land ownership.

Rather than buying a piece of land and calling it yours, you can enter into a relationship with people and their land that has been cared for by generations before and will hopefully be cared for by generations after in the same or similar way.

You could spend time in a community where wealth is not primarily accumulated as individual property, but held through family, relationships, land, food, knowledge and responsibility.

You could contribute your skills to a place that also simultaneously nourishes you in different ways.

I think it would be a good match for people developing tools for financial sovereignty to meet people who already practise a different kind of sovereignty every day.

That is the experiment I am interested in.

The village faces economic challenges and pressures because cash is increasingly necessary for fuel, transport, internet, imported goods and other connections to the outside economy. Villagers only receive a fraction of the eventual value of what they produce when intermediaries stand between them and the wider market.

So I am asking:

Could the knowledge developed by you in the freedom technology community help the village retain more of the value it already creates?

Could peer-to-peer systems help villagers transact more directly?

Could privacy technology protect people from unnecessary financial surveillance?

Could open-source tools help the community control the technology it depends upon?

Could alternative currencies or cryptocurrencies create additional pathways for value to circulate?

Could technology connect remote families directly with people around the world who want to support, buy from, visit, learn from or work alongside them?

And could the village offer something in return that cannot be downloaded, bought or put on a blockchain?

A lived experience of land custodianship.

A functioning culture of mutual obligation.

A place where children, elders, food, land and knowledge are already part of the wealth of the community.

A chance to experience what it means to contribute to land without needing to “own” it.

Perhaps the relationship could be mutually transformative.

The freedom technology community might bring tools for financial sovereignty.

The village offers an experience of social, ecological and land-based sovereignty.

One can learn from the other and explore  what could happen when people who are into financial freedom meet a community that already possesses another kind of freedom.

That is the invitation.