From Bitcoin to Burning Man and Beyond: The Quest for Identity and Autonomy in a Digital Society

What can we learn from Bitcoin and Burning Man about re-inventing money and designing better forms of self-governance? From Bitcoin to Burning Man and Beyond explores a new generation of digital technologies that are re-imagining the very foundations of identity, governance, trust and social organization. The fifteen essays of this book stake out the foundations of a new future – a future of open Web standards and data commons, a society of decentralized autonomous organizations, a world of trustworthy digital currencies and self-organized and expressive communities like Burning Man. Among the contributors are Alex “Sandy” Pentland of the M.I.T. Human Dynamics Laboratory, former FCC Chairman Reed E. Hundt, long-time IBM strategist Irving Wladawksy-Berger, monetary system expert Bernard Lietaer, Silicon Valley entrepreneur Peter Hirshberg, journalist Jonathan Ledgard and H-Farm cofounder Maurizio Rossi. From Bitcoin to Burning Man and Beyond was edited by Dr. John H. Clippinger, cofounder and executive director of ID3, [http://www.idcubed.org] and David Bollier, [http://www.bollier.org] an Editor at ID3 who is also an author, blogger and scholar who studies the commons. The book reflects ID3’s vision of the huge, untapped potential for self-organized, distributed governance on open platforms. A title chapter traces the 28-year history of Burning Man, the week-long encampment in the Nevada desert that have hosted remarkable experimentation in new forms of self-governance by large communities. Other chapters explore such cutting-edge concepts as: evolvable digital contracts that could supplant conventional legal agreements; smartphone currencies that could help Africans meet their economic needs more effective; the growth of the commodity-backed Ven currency; and new types of “solar currencies” that borrow techniques from Bitcoin to enable more efficient, cost-effective solar generation and sharing by homeowners.