Matt Prewitt: Social Technology, Community Currencies, and RadicalxChange

We chat with Matt Prewitt from RadicalxChange about rethinking communities through intentional design and social technology. The conversation explores various types of intentional communities, including affinity communities, individualist escape communities, and responsible experimenters.

Matt highlights how responsible experimentation can create more sustainable and impactful spaces and argues that mutual vulnerability is essential for building trust and shared identity. This is illustrated by RadicalxChange's use of community currencies like "∈dges" at Edge City’s pop-up villages, an experiment to incentivize local exchange and keeping value circulating in the community.

The chat closes with ideas on how such social technologies can cultivate human flourishing by combining global connectedness with robust, locally supportive systems.

Links

Matt Prewitt: https://x.com/m_t_prewitt

Timour Kosters: https://x.com/timourxyz

RadicalxChange: https://www.radicalxchange.org/

Edge City: https://twitter.com/joinedgecity

Edge City Lanna: https://www.edgecity.live/lanna

Chapters

(00:00) Introduction

(02:14) RadicalxChange’s Mission and Theory of Change

(06:45) Georg Simmel and the Power of Secrecy in Communities

(14:23) Three Types of New Community Initiatives

(24:53) The Importance of Social Technology

(33:29) Associative Obligations and Mutual Vulnerability

(47:42) Reimagining Money: Community Currencies

(59:35) Lessons from Community Currency Experiments

(1:11:36) Community Currency Experiment at Edge City

(1:21:43) Pop-up Villages and the Future of Intentional Communities

(1:24:53) Human Flourishing