Part 2: The Feminine and the decentralized paradigm
As women, we need to examine the ways in which our world can be truly different. I am speaking here of the necessity for reassessing the quality of all the aspects of our lives and of our work, and of how we move toward and through them.
The very word erotic comes from the Greek word eros, the personification of love in all its aspects - born of Chaos, and personifying creative power and harmony. When I speak of the erotic, then, I speak of it as an assertion of the lifeforce of women; of that creative energy empowered, the knowledge and use of which we are now reclaiming in our language, our history, our dancing, our loving, our work, our lives.
- Audre Lorde, Uses of the Erotic
As the internet interconnected the world globally, it shifted the fundamental aspects of the business world. The dynamics are shifting away from one-way communication and from large corporations pushing products to their customers to interconnected networks where everyone can communicate and collaborate with each other.
Right now, this dynamic is deepening. Web3, with its blockchain powered technology, enables initiatives that, from the start, have an operating system and infrastructure built for decentralization and self-organizing. As initiatives which are built with network paradigm logics at the core enter the market, incumbents that are clinging to Web2 central ownership or even pre-internet logics will have a very hard time. In addition to being outcompeted when it comes to relevance and rate of innovation, companies will be chanceless in attracting the internet native generations Z and Alpha, who have a networked worldview running through their veins.
In this emerging game the winners are the ones who manage to build businesses that enable and leverage the enormous network based resource of interaction and collaboration between employees, partners and customers. In other words; the ones who create the platforms and networks on which users are pulled into becoming co-creative partners.
In addition to defining the key to success for individual initiatives, Web3 is defining the architecture of the internet and will set the foundation for what kind of world we will be able to create for generations to come.
With the new ruling currencies – participation and attention – determining your endeavor’s success, you will need women on board; specifically women empowered in their feminine. Success in Web3 will be dependent on a strong feminine leadership that can fuel your adaptability and create the gravitational field that will enable you to grow vigorously and thrive in the decentralized world of the Internet, by attracting the right employees, users, partners, and resources – including money. Also, in order to create a regenerative world at large, Web3 needs to be built in fruitful collaboration between alive feminine and mature masculine leadership. To thrive individually and collectively, we need an awakened feminine that is supported by a grounded masculine in service. Intrigued? I will soon dive deeper into these claims, but first, let’s take a look at the current landscape of Web3.
The lost connection between the feminine and the mature masculine
Today, the blockchain, crypto and Web3 world has a heavy over-representation of young men. Agewise, 94% of all crypto is traded by people under the age of 40 and 70% of the world's crypto users are men. Although this does sound worrying for gender equality, it is actually not that surprising and doesn't have to be something bad in itself.
Regardless of how much technology and society has evolved in the last few centuries, our core biology took thousands of years to develop into its current form. We still have the same biology and psyche affecting much of how we act in the world as we did living in tribes. In the tribe it was always the young men, with a body filled up with testosterone and with a psyche very prone to risk-taking, that explored the new hunting grounds. Today far away woods are simply replaced by the world of blockchain, crypto and Web3.
However, a defining difference between our current situation and tribal life is that in the tribe, these young men had huge respect for the women and male elders of the tribe. The women and male elders were the ones who both guided the men on where to most purposefully hunt and those who called them back to share their catch and integrate new learnings with the tribe. Back then, the young men understood their need for guidance from the feminine and the elders and they understood how hollow and deprived of meaning a life in the woods with a lot of meat but no connection to something bigger than themselves and a tribe would be.
Thus, the mere fact that young men are overrepresented in today's high risk, chaotic, cowboy landscape of crypto and Web3 is not surprising nor worrying per se. What is worrying is the disconnect between these young men in the Web3 world and the guidance from the feminine and the elder masculine. We lack women who are awakened to their feminine power and we lack men who have stepped into a guiding masculine role.
Redefining and remembering femininity
That more women are needed in the tech scene is not a new claim. But the understanding of what a mature masculine is and the claim that more feminine women are needed is.
This is a provocative topic. The battle for women has in the past centuries been a battle to rightfully receive an equal place at the table and to not be negatively treated differently. It is due to the fact that we have come so far when it comes to women’s rights in highly egalitarian cultures like Sweden, that some of us now have the privilege to deepen the women's movement, on top of these hygiene conditions. In societies where we are reaching closer to a culture valuing men and women as equally vital in all of their forms, we can now afford to transcend the idea that men and women are basically all the same and with this start creating conditions for both men and women to truly thrive in their differences.
Fighting for our right to be present at the table has often meant stepping into very masculine shoes. In the tech scene it is no different. Many women, including me, have owed our success to adopting masculine ways of being and doing. Although this might truly be a great path for many women, it does not bring in the much needed feminine into organizations, and it is draining for many women who choose to fit their feminine nature in a masculine frame. I and many women around me have gone through varying levels of burn out throughout our careers when doing our best in corporate cultures dominated by masculine norms.
At the same time many women, including just a slightly younger version of myself, do not feel drawn at all to the feminine. I believe this is part due to the often very shallow one-dimensional characterizations of both the masculine and the feminine. If you google feminine and masculine leadership, masculine leadership is described as confident, assertive and egoistic, and feminine leadership as receptive, vulnerable, and caring.
It was not until I came in contact with Lovisa Alséns Awakening Feminine Leadership path where I got to experience the deeper, and to me, more true, dimensions of the feminine, as well as how they can interact with the mature masculine, that I have been able to embrace the feminine. I now see there are more complex interrelationships at play than mainstream culture teaches. I have realized that, rather than the masculine and feminine merely being in polarity with each other, there are strong polarities within the masculine, and the feminine is highly cyclical.
Through my studies and practice on the Awakening Feminine Leadership path, observation of other women and men also pioneering feminine and masculine leadership and deep exploration of the cutting edge of decentralized leadership, I have synthesized a model that explains the depth within the masculine and the feminine as well as the creative dance between them.
I have explained the article in depth in this part 1 article, and for the rest of this text to make sense at a deeper level I recommend you to read it. If not, here is a shorter summary: In addition to the feminine and masculine being in polarity with each other, there are two main polarities within the masculine; the groundend holding masculine and the executing creating masculine. The feminine flows cyclically in and out of the lifeforce creating feminine and the unifying holding feminine. All creative processes start with the creating feminine sourcing the life force. When she is met by the present consciousness of the holding masculine direction is created. This direction can then be executed upon by the creating masculine. During the execution face the creative energy is kept together by the holding feminine that also makes sure we go back to the creating feminine when the creation process is done and it is time for the next creative cycle to start.
The feminine in Web3
Although this creative cycle is true for all types of projects and organizations, it is especially relevant for Web3 and decentralized endeavors. In the Industrial Age you only needed one good idea to build a Creating Masculine production machine on top of, that could produce that product ever more efficiently. Creativity was initially needed to identify the market need, but once that was done, to succeed in penetrating the market, success came down to execution and grit. In this era it has worked quite well to spend most of our time working from the Creating Masculine, at least in traditional measurement of success not taking other factors such as social or environmental impact.
In the decentralized digital age, with its rapid change, peer-to-peer dynamics and information overload, the keys to success lie in your ability to constantly adapt and to attract attention, resources, users and co-creators. Without mastering the creative dance between the Creating Feminine, Holding Masculine, Creating Masculine and Holding Feminine - you will never be able to reach the depth of creativity and speed of innovation needed to adapt and keep up with the exponentially increasing rate of change within the world of Web3.
Furthermore, an awakened feminine leadership is needed to create the gravitational field that will pull in the right resources, employees and customers. If you ever walk into an office and get the feeling “wow there is a lot of life here!” - I would bet it is the presence of a strong creative feminine. And in a decentralized world where there are endless opportunities of what to spend your time and energy on, people will want to spend it in the initiatives and projects that vibrate with this energy. The initiatives and projects that feel real, and that touch people's inner worlds. This is what the creative feminine does. Without her, you are chanceless in building the decentralized platforms that will attract the most engaged and skilled people across the globe over the long-term.
She cannot do it alone. She needs to be backed by the Holding Masculine. Especially in current times when the feminine is so forcefully shut out of the business world - women really need men to back us. To step in and create the space we need for the energy of the creative feminine to work her magic through us, enabling us to access our inner power and embody the leadership of the Holding Feminine. This lifeforce accessed through the Creating Feminine is precisely the fuel that powers women regeneratively, corresponding to how testosterone does for men. We need men to forcefully carve out and hold up the pockets of air in the crazy world of Web3 where we women can breathe and start to remember who we really are. And as we do, we need a Holding Masculine that can transform the life force coming through us into actionable direction, take charge in the midst of all the chaos and with integrity and in collaboration with the fierce Holding Feminine send the Creating Masculine into purposeful execution.
Learning from Web2
But the feminine isn’t just central when it comes to having success in Web3. Zooming out beyond the benefits of single individuals or initiatives, the future of humans on this planet will be enormously affected by what the shift from Web2 to Web3 entails; whether we learn from past mistakes or not and in doing so are able to create a regenerative world through a Web3 where both the masculine and feminine can thrive.
In Web 2.0, the masculine has to a great extent extracted and used the feminine. Feminine qualities have been key to thriving on social platforms, and many women have built success by skillfully surfing the social media waves. Their success however, has from a larger perspective ultimately served predominantly male-owned platforms. The feminine’s place has been to suckle projects such Facebook and the like in impressive global expansions. Zooming out beyond human dynamics and seeing the feminine as mother earth, this extractive relationship becomes even more clear.
Not only does this create a dynamic between the masculine and the feminine that is deeply damaging and fans the flame of the culture war between men and women, but moreover, without the feminine we will never be able to actually build regenerative systems. To explain this claim let's look at a concrete example from the business world.
The deficiency of centralization
One company I worked with some years ago had a grand vision of enabling a regenerative world through creating customer powered commerce. The idea was to create a platform where all customers globally share their experiences, data and feedback whenever they buy a product. Aggregated, this data would then put collectively intelligent pressure on producers to produce products in line with customers needs and values. Flipping the market from producers pushing their products onto customers through marketing to consumers pulling out the products they want from producers in line with consumers’ values.
This is a truly well-intended vision, but after working close to it I realized that it was never going to work to create a regenerative world through a centralized platform. In a centralized system, there will always be a centrally designed value system underlying the algorithms and technology that determine key factors. In this case for example; what customer feedback was given more weight.
Engagement wise, the steering of activity by centrally designing values ultimately has the effect of making lifeforce suffocate and activity on the platform die out. Impact wise, regardless of how amazing and thought through values you design with, there will always be instances where there is some aspect of the complexity of reality that hasn’t been taken into account, which however minor discrepancy, over time will lead to imbalances that on an aggregated global level will cause severe damage.
In addition, there has never in history been an entity run by a leader, granted the enormous power it would mean owning and running such a platform, whose ego eventually hasn’t gotten in the way - no matter how enlightened and well intended they were. Small groups of humans are simply not designed for the task.
In other words, there will never be a centralized system that can design a guiding value system that meets the complexity of nature. It is the ultimate surrender into realizing that we are not in control (and ultimately that we will die). Man should not try to play God, and we have to come to terms with the fact that the world is messy and not in our control.
A thriving Web3 in service of life
One human should and cannot be God, but a globally connected, all-seeing and decentralized Internet is probably the closest we can come to a God metaphor today. And it is the web3 associated technology that can enable this God-in-the-future to be life-serving, by allowing for decentralized adaptation to what momentarily supports the flourishing of nature and human activity.
However, technology that enables decentralized ownership is still only the prerequisite, not the full solution. Even though this technology affords exponentially better solutions than centralized platforms, smart contracts on the blockchain will not automatically serve life. Or at least not yet – and when AI can do such discernment, a plausible outcome is that they decide that humans are not needed any longer!
But until then, for humanity, it is the leadership behind the blockchain powered initiatives that decides what is possible to achieve through technology. And this is where we traditionally rely on organizational values and purpose for guidance. However, as illustrated by the example in the previous section, our point is that no purpose statement or values created only from the masculine mind will be able to stay relevant and hold the complexity needed to navigate today’s and the future’s business landscape, no matter how well thought through or well intended.
The only purpose that can hold sufficient complexity is the intention to continuously be in service of life, or in other words to act in service of the Creating Feminine. This is a deeply embodied leadership practice, far from using a written purpose statement as an endeavor’s main guidance. The Creating Feminine is the void from which new life emerges, she is the apparently random movements that underlie evolution. She is what grants us access to that which we do not already know. If we do not build in service of her, we will only create more of that which we already have. It is precisely this shift; from extraction of the feminine to service of her, that humanity desperately needs to keep thriving on this planet.
This journey of a man daring to let go of control and over-identification with his ego in order to face the void that is the Creating Feminine, realizing his powernessless to her and from there beginning to act in service is the, literally dead-scary, and honorable journey of becoming an adult as a man. And for women, surrendering into the power that wants to come through you and to trust and let your true self be seen there by the masculine is the equally intimidating corresponding journey into womanhood.
The time is now
There are very many young men in Web3 who, consciously or unconsciously, are lost without guidance from their tribe. We urgently need more women living an awakened feminine leadership and we need more men honorably stepping into a mature Holding Masculine. If you make contact with the global field, you can probably sense the deep void we are in at the moment – a paradigm shift, a crisis, a deep opportunity… you may name it whatever you like. From this place, the architecture of the new Internet is rapidly being built, and how that turns out will affect humanity at its deepest, by being a central infrastructure to our new societies. We are still just in the first inning of development, which means that most shaping of the new is still to take place. The coming years will set the architecture and culture of Web3.
We are in the midst of creating our future. Let us together make it vibrant, brave, efficient and loving. Let us surrender to the fact that men and women might never truly understand each other, and that we can love, empower and support one another to be the best version of ourselves. As women, let us be free, wild, powerful, alive and let us remember who we truly are - let us reclaim the assertion of the lifeforce of women. As men and as women, let us grow up and let us show up. Let us support the blockchain pioneers in the Creating Masculine with guidance from the Feminine and Holding Masculine so that we can actually build something to be proud of for generations to come.
Let us build a Web3 in service of Life.
This text has been written together with the amazing Åsa Jonsson with input from Fati Hakim, Faviana Vangelius Von Heijne, Tom Nixon and Lovisa Alsén. The text was written as a part of Fati, Åsa, Fanny and Faviana’s Initiative to bring in more Women into Web3.