A couple weeks ago Perry Knoppert organised a Zoom call between The Octopus Movement, a global network of multipotentialites, and Nobody Studios, “a crowd-infused, high-velocity company creation machine at the forefront of innovation and impact. Our Mission: 100 New Companies in 5 Years.”

After an introduction to their business model, several dozen of us Octopi were given a prompt to explore the idea of creating a business opportunity around the many abandoned gold mines in the United States.

As I begun interrogating my own thoughts and feelings about the subject of mining, I found myself at an ethical crossroads. Would my candid environmentalist position on mining even appeal to investors looking to make a return on investment? Would my belief in supporting indigenous struggles for land rights ruffle feathers?

I decided to forge ahead, despite these doubts, and use the forgiving vehicle of Venture Fiction. As a fiction, it is a vessel for exploring ideas and ethical alignments; a litmus test for organisational values and an opportunity to reflect on my own biases.

My friend Dmitry Paranyushkin’s blog Polysingularity was the first place I encountered the practice of Venture Fiction. As a student and practitioner of Design Fiction, it was immediately appealing.

Venture Fiction

Since stumbling across his practice years ago, I have become an avid Venture Fiction practitioner myself. Why? Because I enjoy opportunities to use Venture Fiction as a real world interface that bridges the chasm between art and business. My role is to provoke, imagine, and inspire.

Today’s experiment in Venture Fiction is the furthest I have pushed the envelope so far with my practice. Until now, most of my experiments with this form have gravitated towards the fiction end of the spectrum, falling into the category of mostly unpublished short stories.

Below is the deck I presented. It is for a fictional company called Móola. Be sure to read my own self criticism afterwards, as there are many ideas compressed into this deck that are intended to spark questions and not provide definitive answers:

So obviously, as a Venture Fiction, I have no idea about a lot of the details of this enterprise. Foremost on my mind are questions around the connection to indigenous stewardship:

1. Would the indigenous peoples who claim these lands as ancestral lands even want to be a part of this sort of enterprise?
2. If they were interested, is there any likelihood that the players who are capable of executing on this sort of technology strategy would have the capacity to collaborate equitably with said indigenous peoples?
3. Is the use of the Navajo word óola and/or the seal of the Navajo Nation in this context culturally insensitive or offensive?
4. Is the term “world class indigenous reparations” a valid way of describing what is being presented here, or is there better language for what this would be?
5. Is issuing a gold-backed crypto-currency a good way of enabling indigenous financial freedom, or is there a saviour complex baked in here somewhere?

These questions are only the tip of the iceberg in terms of interrogating the position of this Venture Fiction. We haven’t even scratched the surface on the technical / business questions:

1. Does the technology exist today to deploy robots into abandoned gold mines to accurately assess the value of the gold deposits contained therein?
2. Is an entity which mines a gold-backed crypto currency a red herring in a post-FTX crypto-skeptical financial environment?
3. Would this be a money making enterprise in itself, or would the platform (robots, smart contracts, etc) be the business model?

These are all valid questions – and honestly questions I don’t have answers to. But that is ok. Because at the end of the day, this is not a real company, it is a Venture Fiction. It lands somewhere between a thought experiment, a hypothetical business case, and a work of conceptual art.

If you are somebody with answers to any of these questions, by all means, please add your perspective in the comments section.

Gold mine robot image generated using DALL·E 2.
All other images are property of their respective copyright holders.