Projects
Black Sky Nexus
Black Sky Nexus is a zine and wiki that serves as the evolving knowledge base of the Black Sky community. It embodies Paulo Freire's concept of liberating education as acts of cognition rather than information transfer. Black Sky Thinking, introduced by Rachel Armstrong in 2014, refers to speculative thought experiments aimed at recreating ecosystems. Black Sky applies this approach to organizations, using speculation, world-building, and creative experiments to explore novel ways of supporting projects and research. Primary topics covered by Black Sky Nexus include cryptographic resources for large-scale cooperation networks, bio-sovereignty, art as a generative source of knowledge, and exploring the relationship between the individual, ecosphere, and cosmos.
The Post-Web
Tornado Cash's sanctioning highlights the fragility of the cryptocurrency ecosystem. Some smart contracts on Ethereum, enabling financial privacy, are illegal in the US. GitHub accounts are censored, open source developers are jailed, and phishing scams and multi-million dollar hacks persist. Crypto remains a primitive environment, deterring many, and over-compliance stifles protocol design. Web3 tools do not align with cypherpunk privacy ethos, nor do Web3 fundamentals. Rather than adopting the web paradigm, why not create a Post-Web? Tools must be extralegal, decentralized, and not reliant on third-party services. To support Black Sky and the wider crypto ecosystem, we're exploring a first-principles approach to the Post-Web ecosystem, studying relevant protocols, projects, and technologies.
Transformative Autonomous Organizations
The Transformative Autonomous Organization (TAO) includes six foundational elements: autonomous adaptivity (α), anonymous functioning (φ), labor dissolution (δ), synergetic coexistence (χ), cosmic stewardship (σ), and autarkic experimentation (ε). The intention is to combine these elements to transform humanity's relationship with work, money, and resources.
TBA Space Mission
Black Sky is currently conceptualizing an open science space mission. The results of the scientific experiments will be openly patented, rather than kept as proprietary intellectual property. We are researching alternative mechanisms to DeSci's popular IP-NFT.
Events
Black Sky organizes real world and virtual events, which focus on sharing knowledge, discussing ideas, or experiencing the arts. The first virtual event we organized was
Azimuth, which took place December 20-21, 2020.
Our second virtual event took place on February 2, 2022.
We are the lead organizer of
Autonomous Ecologies (AE). AE1 was a side event at EthDenver, that took place on March 4, 2023. During this event, we delved into the relationship between sovereignty and privacy and how to establish privacy as a cornerstone of new technology. AE2 is coming up in July 2023 as a side event at EthCC in Paris.