Accidental Gods - The Thrutopian Podcast

"The ecological movement is the largest movement in human history, yet it is fragmented because it is using the "tools of the master" for coordination, resource sharing, and conflict resolution...While many technologists have created social networking technology, they have not succeeded in creating good coordination because social networking tools do not address enough of the primary coordination mechanics for scalable trust."  Grace Rachmany: Sideways Earth on Github
Friend of the podcast, Grace Rachmany is a mother, a tech industry trouble shooter, author of over a hundred white papers and co-author of the book, 'So you've got a DAO: Handbook for Distributed and Connected Leadership'. She's Executive Director of the Decentralized Identity Foundation and it's this that we're exploring today. 
It's long been established on this podcast that the old paradigm is not fit for purpose and is, in fact, in the process of disintegrating beneath our feet. 
We know we need to create communities of place, purpose and passion - but if we can do this, how do we find other communities to link with so we can:
Scale from community to region. (based on shared action)
Keep one another accountable for behaviors that reflect what we say our values are (people are also squishy when they say the word values). 
Scale behaviour change beyond a closed or Dunbar-number community to multiple communities.
 Scale actions and collaborations to regional levels without a hierarchical coordination structure. 
Coordinate actions and behaviors based on the commons we share, whether or not we share "values". 
This is the missing link that is often overlooked as we craft a way forward to a world that works, and I'm so glad someone with Grace's outstanding intellect and depth of heart is exploring this.  
And that she's willing to come here and talk about it. 
So here we go: a wide, deep, full conversation on the missing link of scaleable trust.  Enjoy! 

Links
Grace's website
Grace on LinkedIn
Decentralized Identify Foundation
Grace on YouTube - co-creating the third attractor
Sideways Earth Website
Sideways Earth on Github
Elinor Ostrom's 8 Principles for Governing a Commons
—About Accidental Gods—

We offer three strands all rooted in the same soil, drawing from the same river: Accidental Gods, Dreaming Awake and the Thrutopia Writing Masterclass
Our next Open Gathering offered as part of our Accidental Gods Programme is 'BECOMING A GOOD ANCESTOR' which will run on Sunday 13th September 2026 from 16:00 - 20:00 GMT - details are here. You don't have to be a member of Accidental Gods to come along, but if you are, all Gatherings are half price.

If you'd like to join us at Accidental Gods, this is the membership where we endeavour to help you to connect fully with the living web of life.
If you'd like to train more deeply in the contemporary shamanic work at Dreaming Awake, you'll find us here.
If you'd like to explore the recordings from our last Thrutopia Writing Masterclass, the details are here
Manda and Louise both offer one-to-one Mentoring Calls.  Manda is writing a book just now, but if you'd like to contact Louise, details are here.

"The Possitopian approach to future thinking expands the cone of the possible future, draws on geophysical realities and data, and also applies imagination to help you imagine future scenarios which are potentially worse or better than you might allow yourself to think." 
So says this week's guest, Bridget McKenzie. Bridget is an artist and regenerative thought leader working to engage people with what she calls the Earth Crisis -which is a new term to me but feels a much better fit than MetaCrisis or Polycrisis. Her career includes being Tate’s Education manager and the British Library’s Head of Learning. In 2006, she founded Flow Associates, a research consultancy in cultural learning. In the past decade, she has focused on the intersection of culture and environment, and has developed training, collectives and campaigns pushing at the radical edges of this field. This includes founding Climate Museum UK, a creative collective putting the Earth Crisis in context, and Earth Talk, a community of practice for Earth Literacy. She co-founded Culture Declares, a movement of cultural workers declaring a planetary emergency. She experiments with creative activism in her city of Norwich.
And creative activism is what we're all about - how do we stretch our imaginations beyond the bounds of what we believe to be true now, to what might be true if we can only lay the foundations for something utterly outside our current capacity to imagine?
This was such an inspiring conversation with someone who thinks deeply about the nature of art, creativity, culture - and the ways we can engage ourselves and each other at the deepest level.
Links
Bridget's Website
Earth Talk
Climate Museum UK
Possitopia on Medium
—About Accidental Gods—

We offer three strands all rooted in the same soil, drawing from the same river: Accidental Gods, Dreaming Awake and the Thrutopia Writing Masterclass
Our next Open Gathering offered as part of our Accidental Gods Programme is 'BECOMING A GOOD ANCESTOR' which will run on Sunday 13th September 2026 from 16:00 - 20:00 GMT - details are here. You don't have to be a member of Accidental Gods to come along, but if you are, all Gatherings are half price.

If you'd like to join us at Accidental Gods, this is the membership where we endeavour to help you to connect fully with the living web of life.
If you'd like to train more deeply in the contemporary shamanic work at Dreaming Awake, you'll find us here.
If you'd like to explore the recordings from our last Thrutopia Writing Masterclass, the details are here
Manda and Louise both offer one-to-one Mentoring Calls.  Manda is writing a book just now, but if you'd like to contact Louise, details are here.

How do we make a peaceful transition to a wholly new system when the old one is sustained by those who profit most from the self-terminating zombie of predatory capitalism?
Our guest this week has spent the past decade devising an answer to this most central of our questions. Remzi Bajrami is co-founder of Common Planet Foundation and creator of Creditism, which is his answer to our dilemma. 
In his words, Creditism is—
- a new economic system designed around life instead of debt. Credit flows to people because existence itself has value — it circulates through life, then clears. It supports living without becoming a permanent claim on the future.
 - a non-debt economic system designed to replace extraction with flow, scarcity with access, and coercion with coordination. Where today’s money is largely created through debt and accumulated as power, Creditism reframes money as credit: a shared unit of access created through existence, earned through contribution, and dissolved when used.
 - the gateway to a global economy that is cleaner, fairer, and more life-aligned — one that supports human potential, community self-governance, and planetary regeneration.
Creditism is the economic architecture for a species that wants to survive.

There are still some unanswered questions in this, but there are always going to be until we get moving with something, test it out and reinvent it on the fly.  What Remzi and his colleagues have done is to set up a system that you can join now - or at least in early August 2026 - and become a part of a network that will test this out.  in the meantime, Remzi has written a series of Substacks which lay out in straightforward terms how the current system is predicated on power over, how money works - because we can't hear that one too often - and how creditism could work instead. Enjoy!
Links
Common Planet website
Remzi on LinkedIn
Remzi on Substack
Creditism 1
Creditism 2
Creditism 3
—About Accidental Gods—

We offer three strands all rooted in the same soil, drawing from the same river: Accidental Gods, Dreaming Awake and the Thrutopia Writing Masterclass
Our next Open Gathering offered as part of our Accidental Gods Programme is 'BECOMING A GOOD ANCESTOR' which will run on Sunday 13th September 2026 from 16:00 - 20:00 GMT - details are here. You don't have to be a member of Accidental Gods to come along, but if you are, all Gatherings are half price.

If you'd like to join us at Accidental Gods, this is the membership where we endeavour to help you to connect fully with the living web of life.
If you'd like to train more deeply in the contemporary shamanic work at Dreaming Awake, you'll find us here.
If you'd like to explore the recordings from our last Thrutopia Writing Masterclass, the details are here
Manda and Louise both offer one-to-one Mentoring Calls.  Manda is writing a book just now, but if you'd like to contact Louise, details are here.

If you listen to this podcast then you care about people and planet and how we make it through this potential crunch point when all our crises mash together.
But what if you knew you were not alone? What if you knew that almost everyone in our culture cares about this, they just don't know what to do about it? They don't have what this week's guest, Dr Liam Kavanagh, calls the 'Victory Stories' to show how we made it through.
Liam is a founding Co-Director of the Climate Majority Project, an organisation that has worked since 2022 to extend climate action beyond the vocal minority of activists to the concerned but quiet majority. His social science background informs CMP’s theory of change and strategy. He began his career as an applied economist in New York and Tanzania. Motivated by questions about ideology and cognitive dissonance in political economy, he completed a PhD in Cognitive Science at the University of California, San Diego. In 2016, he co-founded Life Itself, a European polycrisis-response network (we spoke to Sylvie Barbier from Life Itself a few weeks ago), and has authored two books and numerous reports.
His latest reports: Mobilising Silent Majorities is one of the must-reads of this year.  Please do download and read the pdf - at least the executive summary. This is a long, detailed, dynamic look at how many people really do care about the polycrisis. As he says, 'Across society, many people recognise serious risks—climate disruption, inequality, instability—but these concerns often stay private. The report identifies six “silent majorities” whose hidden views could shift what feels politically possible:
The climate-concerned majority – Most people see climate change as a serious threat but rarely talk about it in daily life.
The climate-concerned business majority – Business leaders see climate risks but hesitate to speak publicly.
The reticent scientific majority – Scientists privately worry about worst-case scenarios but communicate cautiously.
The decline- and collapse-concerned majority – Many fear overlapping crises, yet these concerns are rarely voiced.
The depolarising majority – Citizens who favour cooperation over conflict are often drowned out by louder, polarising voices.
The intrinsic-values majority – People prioritise family, community, and wellbeing, but economic pressures often prevent these values from guiding their lives.
When concern remains unspoken, it appears weaker than it is. And when people feel alone in their worries, silence becomes the apparently safest choice.
But it doesn't have to be like this.  What if we were able to speak up in our communities of place, purpose and passion and let other people know they're not alone? That we are, in fact, a huge, huge majority?  What if we were able to seed ideas out into the conversations that are happening on- and off-line so that we all acknowledge the system is not fit for purpose and all have good, workable ideas of how to fix it?
What if we embodied the 'Victory Stories' of this time and transformed our future?
It's all to play for now, and here's someone with the ideas at his fingertips.  Enjoy!
Liam on LinkedIn
Climate Majority Project
Silent Majorities Sub-stack
Silent Majorities Report pdf
—About Accidental Gods—

We offer three strands all rooted in the same soil, drawing from the same river: Accidental Gods, Dreaming Awake and the Thrutopia Writing Masterclass
Our next Open Gathering offered as part of our Accidental Gods Programme is 'BECOMING A GOOD ANCESTOR' which will run on Sunday 13th September 2026 from 16:00 - 20:00 GMT - details are here. You don't have to be a member of Accidental Gods to come along, but if you are, all Gatherings are half price.

If you'd like to join us at Accidental Gods, this is the membership where we endeavour to help you to connect fully with the living web of life.
If you'd like to train more deeply in the contemporary shamanic work at Dreaming Awake, you'll find us here.
If you'd like to explore the recordings from our last Thrutopia Writing Masterclass, the details are here
Manda and Louise both offer one-to-one Mentoring Calls.  Manda is writing a book just now, but if you'd like to contact Louise, details are here.

The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed. William Gibson
We need to talk about Big Tech, and particularly AI - it's ubiquitous, it's powerful, and currently, it's unconstrained and this is not an ideal combination if we live in the real world of mass extinction where human and more-than-human communities are being destroyed to serve the death cult of predatory capitalism at its most rapacious.

The question is  - how do we shift the dial on the future when so many of those whose fortunes are sunk into Tech, and AI in particular, seem to be steeped in the Dark Triad of psychopathy, sadism and narcissism? Is there any sign of hope amidst all the chaos and the frozen despair that narratives of inevitability foster in us?
We turn this week to long-time friend of the podcast, Nathalie Nahai. Nathalie is a celebrated author, keynote speaker and host of the glorious Nathalie Nahai in Conversation podcast which enquires into our relationship with one another, with technology and with the living world. She’s author of the international best-seller Webs Of Influence: The Psychology of Online Persuasion and, more recently, Business Unusual: Values, Uncertainty and the Psychology of Brand Resilience which has been described as “One of the defining business books of our times”. She’s a consultant, artist and the founder of Flourishing Futures Salon, a project that offers curated gastronomical gatherings that explore how we can thrive in times of turbulence and change.

Links
Nathalie's website
Nathalie's podcast
Books
Business Unusual
Webs of Influence
Papal Encyclical on AI

Nathalie's Resources of wonderful people already in this space
PEOPLE
Carole Cadwalladr - https://broligarchy.substack.com/ 
Timnit Gebru - https://dair-institute.org/team/timnit-gebru/ 
Cory Doctorow - https://craphound.com/
Gary Marcus - https://garymarcus.substack.com/ 
Carl Miller - DEMOS - https://demos.co.uk/people/carl-miller/ 
Karen Hao - https://karendhao.com/
Dr Joy Buolamwini - https://www.poetofcode.com/
Wakanyi Hoffman - https://hoffmanwakanyi.wixsite.com/wakanyihoffman
Zak Stein - https://www.zakstein.org/ 
Tristan Harris & Ezra Raskin - https://www.humanetech.com/ 

EVENTS
UN’s AI for Good: Global Summit: https://aiforgood.itu.int/  

BOOKS
Hyperscalers - Paris Marx 
End Times Fascism: And the Fight for the Living World - Naomi Klein & Astra Taylor
Artificial Intimacy: Who We Become When We Talk to Machines - Sherry Turkle
Empire of AI - Karen Hao
Careless People - Sarah Wynn Williams
Stories of Your Life and Others - Ted Chiang
The Future - Naomi Alderman
Enshittification - Cory Doctorow

ORGANISATIONS
https://dair-institute.org/
https://www.thenerve.news/
https://rslmedia.org/
https://airesistlist.org/
https://www.lumiera.ai/ 
—About Accidental Gods—

We offer three strands all rooted in the same soil, drawing from the same river: Accidental Gods, Dreaming Awake and the Thrutopia Writing Masterclass
Our next Open Gathering offered as part of our Accidental Gods Programme is 'BECOMING A GOOD ANCESTOR' which will run on Sunday 13th September 2026 from 16:00 - 20:00 GMT - details are here. You don't have to be a member of Accidental Gods to come along, but if you are, all Gatherings are half price.

If you'd like to join us at Accidental Gods, this is the membership where we endeavour to help you to connect fully with the living web of life.
If you'd like to train more deeply in the contemporary shamanic work at Dreaming Awake, you'll find us here.
If you'd like to explore the recordings from our last Thrutopia Writing Masterclass, the details are here
Manda and Louise both offer one-to-one Mentoring Calls.  Manda is writing a book just now, but if you'd like to contact Louise, details are here.