Edward DeLeon Hickman discusses how Anatha aims to move towards a new economy of abundance. To learn more about Anatha or Edward DeLeon Hickman, feel free to visit http://edwarddeleonhickman.com/

1. WHY ANATHA
Towards a New Economy of Abundance
Edward DeLeon Hickman

2. “YOU NEVER CHANGE THINGS
BY FIGHTING THE EXISTING
REALITY. TO CHANGE
SOMETHING, BUILD A NEW
MODEL THAT MAKES THE
EXISTING MODEL OBSOLETE.”
― BUCKMINSTER FULLER

3. ANATHA
OUR NAME, ANATHA, COMES FROM ANATHAPINDIKA, THE CHIEF LAY DISCIPLE OF
GAUTAMA BUDDHA CONSIDERED BY MANY TO EXEMPLIFY THE THE BUDDHIST
VIRTUE OF GENEROSITY.
This fundamental principle is what interests us, inspires us, and drives us: building systems of generosity, of abundance
— systems built for collective creation rather than atomized consumption
Let’s begin with identifying the problem:
What we refer to as structures of violence. Structural violence is any system or organization that prevents human
beings from self-actualizing. This manifests in many ways, from the insidious everyday assault on well-being to broad
reaching devastation of entire populations. In both cases, there is tremendous loss, socially, economically and
individually, as people are in varied ways prevented from realizing their potential.What is so dangerously insidious
about this is that, as a culture, we assume it’s just the way it is. We even assume scarcity is a fundamental condition of
life — and so we accept, perhaps with a sigh, that some people will inevitably starve and die. So it goes, we say to
ourselves. We may or may not think this is a bad thing but, in both cases, we assume it’s a necessary thing.
E D W A R D D E L E O N H I C K M A N

4. BACKGROUND
At Anatha, we recognize the way things are. But we choose to challenge
the assumption that it’s natural or inevitable. We’re focused on the way
things are evolving — and on the way things could be instead, if we just
put our minds, wills, and resources to it.
No doubt, we could discuss why these systems of violence exist. But while
the past can teach us many lessons, we’re not interested in assigning
blame — instead, we’re interested in identifying the problem clearly in
order to create solutions.
It is precisely this assumption that we
want to question.
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5. In addition to an earth that is being scorched by a system of unbridled
consumption, roughly half of the people in the world today live well
below the poverty line. For the third year in a row, food insecurity has
risen globally, touching nearly a billion lives. Another quarter billion
people don’t have access to a decent education and a shameful 1.6 billion
lack adequate shelter.
Setting the tremendous moral dilemma poverty presents aside for a
moment to consider the issue in purely economic terms, it’s extremely
inefficient to allow so much human resource to go to waste. Every
individual we fail to self-actualize is a net loss to society — someone who
didn’t contribute their insight, wit, intelligence, love. We lose that person’s
productivity, their social contribution, their purpose, and whatever
potential that might have emerged had conditions around them been
more favorable.
Simply put, people who do not have adequate resources to meet their basic
needs cannot self-actualize, and we are all the lesser for it. We all lose the
potential of that person, who is scrambling just to survive.And while the
problem is enormous, we believe the opportunity is equally big.
We’re not naive. We see the scale of the
problem.
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6. Decentralization creates fundamentally new models in which people are no
longer consumers or products: they become partners. This is a radical shift, and
precisely what excites us about this technology. We believe that the systems of
the future are both generative and abundant, that by giving back users the value
that they themselves create by their inclusion in our ecosystem, we can create a
self-sustaining solution to the global problem of structural violence.
Needless to say, we don’t expect that we will solve these massive problems alone
or all at once. On the contrary, we believe it will take an entire ecosystem, a
network of networks, myriad information-age economic tools to unlock value on
a global scale. This in turn will position humanity to free itself from structural
violence once and for all, via self-sustaining systems of structural flourishing.
The information age has already revolutionized media and communications in
ways we could not have dreamed of mere decades ago. We believe the
emergence of decentralized trust networks, digital assets, and immutable ledgers
are better understood when viewed as the transition from industrial age
economic-governance tools into information age economic governance tools.
Now is the time to transform the rest of our civilization by bringing our
economic and governance systems into the information age as well.
The solution is deceptively simple.
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7. And such is our promise at Anatha. One focus of Anatha’s projects is platform
interoperability and network cooperation. We build environments that unlock
value for the user, that can in turn be used to purchase real goods and services.
We are engineering systems of abundance that perpetuate collective
prosperity.Taken in that light, it is then perhaps easier to understand Anatha’s
central supposition: that information age economic tools have the potential to
unlock an age of abundance, (which also explains the title of my upcoming book,
“An Information Age of Abundance”). This in turn will allow us to tackle the
seemingly insurmountable problem of Structural Violence — by creating what
we at Anatha call systems of “Structural Flourishing.”
Structural Flourishing is any system, organization, or government that facilitates
the self-actualization of human beings. We believe this is not only possible due to
the advent of trustless, decentralized, information age economic tools: we believe
these outcomes to be both inevitable and tremendously profitable for any
organization or government that rallies behind their emergence.
Such is the promise, and possibility, of
decentralization.
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8. THIS IS ANATHA’S PURPOSE.
We build systems that
combat structural
violence, by creating
environments in which
structural flourishing
can take root instead.
We put humans at the
forefront of all of our
design choices: human
solutions for a
distinctly human
problem.