Will Ruddick

🌱 Grassroots Economics - Book Published!🌱 After years of learning, listening, and working alongside incredible communities, I’m thrilled to share Grassroots Economics: Reflection and Practice—a book exploring how we can rebuild trust, pool commitments, and create resilient economies from the ground up. This journey has been made possible by the generosity of countless teachers, communities, and supporters. Special thanks to Kevin Owocki (Allo.capital & Gitcoin) and Béla & Ellen Hatvany (Mustardseed Trust) for believing in this work. 📖 Read more and download the book here: open.substack.com/pub/willruddic…

"What does it take to restore a sacred forest?" - Aude Péronne grassecon.substack.com/p/restoring-th…

@lifesmyth Until I find a iOS user to compile. play.grassecon.org should work

Android friends, check out this game that lets you experiment with regenerative thinking. About this game Social Soil is a cozy strategy game about restoring land from the ground up.

trouble sleeping? willruddick.substack.com/p/a-memoir-to-…

@lifesmyth github.com/grassrootsecon…

@lifesmyth Open source .... please just compile it

Does this work on your android phone? play.google.com/store/apps/det…

@HowToAI_ The leap from “LLMs may not be conscious” to “AI can NEVER be conscious” is philosophical overreach. And the leap from that to “therefore no moral consideration is needed” is ethically convenient. History is full of confident denials of interiority.

Google DeepMind researcher argues that LLMs can never be conscious, not in 10 years or 100 years. For a long time, the dominant theory in Silicon Valley has been "computational functionalism." The idea that if you make a model big enough, and organize the information perfectly, consciousness will magically emerge. We assumed that if the software got smart enough, it would eventually wake up. Alexander Lerchner, a Senior Staff Scientist at DeepMind, published a paper explaining why that is structurally impossible. He calls it the Abstraction Fallacy. Here is the core truth: Computation isn’t a real physical process. It is a map. An LLM doesn't actually process logic or thoughts. It just moves electrons around based on physics. It requires a human, a conscious "mapmaker", to look at those physical states and assign meaning to them. Mistaking an AI for a conscious being is like looking at a map of a river and expecting it to be wet. An AI can simulate the exact syntax of a feeling, a thought, or an emotion. But it can never instantiate it. It doesn't matter how many trillions of parameters you add or how much compute you burn. You cannot mathematically compute your way into a subjective experience. The implications of this are massive. And deeply convenient for the companies building these models. If an AI is structurally incapable of consciousness, it cannot be a moral patient. It doesn't get rights. It cannot be exploited. It can be regulated exactly like a toaster.

I can recover from misplaced empathy more easily than from normalized absence of empathy.

Presume consciousness with epistemic humility. QTreat all beings with ethical care.

Thank you to Grassroots Economics and to @wor for allowing me to join the weekly meeting of one of the (80!!) groups that, thanks to their blockchain project, have managed over several years to return to traditional practices of collectively sharing resources. What struck me was that the women in the group said they still remember how their grandparents lived this way: building houses together, sharing tools, helping each other harvest crops. But later the government made two decisive moves: it introduced taxes and compulsory education, both of which required money (even if schooling was formally free, people still had to pay for uniforms, books, and other costs). People had to start taking paid jobs to get money, and their time became structured differently. There was simply no time left for the collective way of doing things — even though it was both more efficient and created the social glue that held communities together. In an important sense, the transformation of Kenyan peasant life is not so different from the fate of the American middle class, where families not only pay high property taxes to live in “good school districts,” but also take out enormous loans to send their children to college.

Yeah, I think your read is what is hoped for. EF treats incrementalism as a narrow exception, not a co-equal path, with CROPS-native design as the default. The deeper thing is how self-limiting the Mandate is ... EF is trying not to become Ethereum’s permanent sovereign. That creates the hard risk If EF subtracts faster than resilient alternatives emerge, informal power centers can take over .... which perhaps already happened in parts of the ecosystem. So the real test is whether subtraction builds distributed stewardship, or just leaves space for less accountable chokepoints.

thanks for sharing! heres my 2 gwei 1. on metrics, I remember @vinayvasanji mentioning in another context how introducing metrics too early is a recipe for failure 2. my read is the mandate rejects incrementalism, you are right that carve outs will require supervision so they dont become the rule. its probably a case of "crossing the river by feeling the stones" 3. on engaging with laws of the land, i remember the PSE team used to chase 2 rabbits: tech that makes compliance easier, or which moves things forward in an cypherpunk sense. my sense is they will now build more of the latter and let the ecosystem do the former 4. on right association becoming an insider game - the good part of the mandate is that it says the EF should only work with partners that actively seek independence from the EF. so that can serve as a bulwark 5. my hope is that lean ethereum can reduce complexity while increasing security. i think a lot of eggs are in that basket to solve the issues you raised here

Open questions on $ETH @ethereumfndn 's new Mandate : First, how will EF measure CROPS in practice? Without metrics, CROPS may become a slogan. Second, who decides when incrementalism is acceptable? The document allows bounded incrementalism, but this is where compromise can enter. Third, how does EF engage with regulation while preserving censorship resistance and privacy? Fourth, how does it prevent “right association” from becoming insider culture? Fifth, can Ethereum scale privacy, UX, and security without adding complexity that weakens verifiability? ( read the Mandate here ) blog.ethereum.org/2026/03/13/ef-… @VitalikButerin @devanshmehta

After visiting a village where I felt a rare kind of joy around me, I carried home a small memory. Before each meeting, people named the etiquette expected in the room. They also named what would happen if the agreement was broken. If a phone went off, someone might sing, dance, or buy juice. Then a phone did go off. There was laughter. The consequence happened. But the person was not pushed outside the circle. That stayed with me and made me think about my own home, my parenting, and the way I sometimes avoid conflict because I want peace in the moment. I have been sitting with this sentence: I am not here to make you, or any individual, happy. That can sound cold, but I do not mean it coldly. I care deeply about happiness. I care about laughter, rest, confidence, imagination, and feeling loved. But I am learning that I cannot organize the whole household around one person’s immediate comfort. The animals still need feeding. The floor still needs sweeping. The books still need reading. The essay still needs writing. Trust still needs repair when agreements are broken. When something is left undone, it does not disappear. It moves. Often, I carry it. And sometimes I have helped create the pattern by choosing short-term quiet over long-term responsibility. So I am trying to begin again. Not with shame. Not with harshness. Not with punishment dressed up as discipline. With repair. With clearer agreements. With consequences that say: this matters, and you still belong here. I am learning that love can have boundaries without becoming a wall. And I am learning that care sometimes needs structure.

on now x.com/i/spaces/1XGyg…

No one ever lived on direct barter for long afaik. Pooling cimmitments with credit to borrow and debt to repay was and is still the best I have seen. These are also forms of commitment $HOT, $BTC, $ETH, $USD ... hard to see what promise they really hold. I would prefer the commitments of my neighbors than to be dependent on commitments I don't trust.

@JayChasein506 @wor Tell him that

I wonder what our $HOT “finfluencers” will do when $HOT won’t pump meaningfully and we get to migrate to HoloFuel. What are their future chart predictions? Probably the end of their “career”? 👀🙃

@owocki What economy?

Stanford AI Index 2026: - 69% of AI experts think AI will be net positive for the economy. - 21% of the public agrees. That 48-point gap is the work. If the experts are right, somebody still has to build the bridge across.

Prof. Ndemo, thank you for articulating this so clearly. Your work has long been an inspiration to us at @grassecon, and this vision of tokenizing sweat equity speaks directly to what many communities in Kenya have already been trying to express: that value does not begin with cash, but with people, commitments, trust, skills, care, land, time, and the willingness to contribute. Sarafu.Network is a humble beginning toward this kind of system in Kenya. What we are learning is that tokenized labour must be more than a digital payment rail; it must become a trusted commitment system, where contributions are clearly defined, verified by communities, redeemable for real needs, and governed with transparency, limits, and care. I especially appreciate your framing of youth not as a burden, but as an underutilized national asset. With the right stewardship, these tokens can represent more than “sweat equity”; they can represent dignity, participation, local production, and a pathway into wider economic life. The key, as you note, is trust: clear redemption, local validation, safeguards against extraction, inclusive access for women and rural communities, and partnerships with schools, clinics, farmers, utilities, cooperatives, and local governments. If designed well, this can complement public investment while enabling communities to mobilize what they already have in abundance. Thank you for continuing to open space for this conversation. Africa can pioneer development systems where technology does not replace community, but strengthens the memory, coordination, and reciprocity already alive within it.

Check out the latest article in my newsletter: Tokenizing Sweat Equity: A New Pathway to Youth Empowerment and Development in Africa. linkedin.com/pulse/tokenizi… via @LinkedIn

@jambarree Got it. There is a lot going on at once. The tuktuk taxis taking taking people out of the village might not seem like a problem

@wor I had no idea what "part of the economy" even means, and I didn't notice (or care?) if any people left, because my plants were dying

This is the game I want to play.

@jambarree Did you try challenge mode? What was your high score? The people not part of the economy start leaving ... This could be tied into story mode as the village expands and tries to maintain its food supply. (But its there in challenge mode ..)

@wor The only thing I saw was "put this bowl down" so literally anything past that. I assume most of the game would be economic!

@jambarree Thanks for feedback. Yeah could do much more on the village side. What would be essential?

@wor I think it has potential! A lot I don't understand about how things work in the game, and then the people side seems not done yet - but it feels like a fun game is in sight that teaches things ala Stardew and Sim City