Beyond de-everything. Regenerative approach to Digital Futures
How cultivating ritual, reciprocity, and embodied wisdom can guide us in creating digital systems rooted in vitality, meaning, and life.
The visions held by those shaping today’s technological landscape seem to have lost touch with technology’s deeper potential.
Take cryptocurrencies, for instance.
Once imagined as foundations of a freer, more vitally distributed world, they quickly became mirrors of the power structures they sought to replace.
This is not an accident. It’s a pattern we keep repeating as a society.
Each time we gain access to breakthrough tools, tools that could transform the rules of coordination, governance, and value creation, we deploy them from the same consciousness level that built the systems we’re trying to escape.
The technology changes. Our operating system doesn’t.
And in the case of crypto, this means repeating the old story: wealth equals worth, and accumulation is the ultimate goal.
Even though digital currencies had opened up for us an entirely new range of tradable assets, they are still measured against the old monetary system, flattening their deeper possibilities.
Yet if we would look a bit deeper, this technology offers something far more radical, a framework for recognizing and exchanging freely what truly matters: our capacity to create, coordinate, trust, and build living systems together.
So why do we keep falling into the same trap?
Perhaps because we’ve been taught to define progress through negation.
We speak in terms of what we’re moving away from rather than what we’re moving toward. We organize our thinking around problems, wounds, resistance, always in relation to what’s broken, never in full clarity about what we’re actually building.
This linguistic habit isn’t trivial.
It shapes our collective consciousness itself.
And when consciousness remains trapped in opposition, even revolutionary tools become weapons in the same old war.
The turn toward possibilities
Regeneration begins from a radically different level. It propose us a point of departure that doesn’t define itself through the prefix “de-”
de-centralisation
de-colonization
de-growth
de-carbonization
Words that still orient us around painful wounds we carry as humanity.
And please don’t get me wrong, they have shaped who we are today, and I don’t underestimate any of them. But each time I use those words, they pull my body back into resistance instead of moving toward qualities that bring solutions and healing.
Sometimes I wonder if our continued use of them isn’t some kind of collective addiction to suffering?
Here’s a simple exercise to illustrate.
Tell me, what images come to your imagination and what type of sensations they trigger in your body when you read these two sentences:
: ̗̀➛ I am against racial violence.
: ̗̀➛ I am for respect and dignity for all human beings.
The intention is the same, but the starting point, the tone, is different.
Compassion, majesty, liberation, transparency, love, integrity!
These are the words we need most today.
These are the words I would love to hear, feel, and exchange in the public sphere.
This small linguistic shift repositions us not as victims of history, nor as controllers of nature, but as creative, embodied participants in a larger field of life.
When we shift our language, we shift our posture toward life.
Over the last decade, regeneration has begun entering policy debates as a response to the growing inadequacy of sustainability and circularity frameworks.
Sustainability, once envisioned as an ambitious horizon, has proven insufficient and ineffective. At its core, sustainability means “ability to sustain” which literally stands for doing less bad while keeping status quo alive.
In Regenerative: The New Sustainable (2020), Gibbons argue that sustainability has become “too static, too slow, and too technocratic” to meet the systemic challenges of the 21st century.
Only 17% of SDG targets are on track, and the most crucial ones: hunger, ecosystem health, institutional trust, are failing.
Let’s take SDG 2 (Zero Hunger) as an example.
Below you can see a screen from the SDG Index, an interactive platform that tracks its progress. Red indicates that significant challenges remain, and orange shows that major challenges remain.
Despite the goal to end hunger by 2030, an estimated 733 million people faced hunger in 2023, equivalent to 1 in 11 people globally, and projections show that by 2030, 670 million will still be hungry, the same level as in 2015.
Well... this does not look effective to me, TBH.
We’re not moving forward. In many cases, we’re moving backward.
The SDG agenda tends to preserve existing structures rather than transform them at their roots. Introduced by the very people who created the problems they’re now attempting to solve, it mitigates harm, instead of cultivating the conditions for life to renew itself.
Where sustainability asks:
How do we reduce our impact?
Regeneration encourage you to consider:
How do we create conditions for life to thrive?
This seemingly small shift in perception transforms everything: mindset, design processes, even the very purpose of technology.
If “doing less bad” approach keeps failing, what would it mean to design systems from an entirely different starting point, one oriented toward vitality and reciprocity?
This is where regeneration enters the play proposing us shift:
From de-centralization to ↝ polycentric intelligence and distributed vitality
From de-colonization to ↝ harmonious co-evolution and symbiotic coexistence
From de-growth to ↝ thriving within natural limits
From de-carbonization to ↝ nature-aligned energy flows
Across academic fields, regeneration is understood not as damage reversal, but as the active capacity of systems (ecological, social, cultural, technological) to evolve toward higher levels of health, complexity, and relationality.
But here lies a paradox.
Even as institutions adopt regenerative language, much of the conversation remains trapped in rational, technocratic frameworks, the same colonial logic that replaced embodied, relational wisdom with metrics and spreadsheets.
This realization pushed me to seek life-wisdom that still breathes beyond this mindset, a search that led me to the Asaro Mudmen Tribe and their simple truth:
“Knowledge is only a rumor until it lives in the muscle.”
Following their approach, and recognizing the systemic gaps in how the SDGs were designed and implemented I began to explore a question that kept returning to me:
What qualities are required for regeneration to truly serve its purpose and not remain another abstraction?
In that search, two truths revealed themselves to me.
Indigenous knowledge
Voices that have often been overlooked due to a long colonial history, a history that replaced knowledge passed through stories and myths, with institutional structures and standardized textbooks, rather than teaching us to learn from diversity and listen to our intuition.
Regenerative mindset, manifested as embodiment and lived practice
Tell me, would you trust a dietitian who is overweight?
The wisdom of healthy living should emerge from muscle and practice, not from theory. People who live this truth habitually and intuitively make decisions that stand for regeneration. They feel it with their whole body, not only repeat it through logic.
And the deeper I went into these two truths, the more they began to reveal themselves to me.
Wisdom older than science
Our minds have become so accustomed to rational perception that credibility itself has become standardized: everything must begin with a literature review and legitimized with statistics.
We often assume that numbers and citations should shape our worldview. Yet numbers are merely the outcomes of observation, offering material for reflection rather than providing transformative wisdom themselves.
Regeneration, however, has been lived intuitively for centuries in many cultures. So I began searching for the stories and myths that have been carrying this wisdom all along.
I immersed myself in explorations of Khoisan traditions, Siberian animism, the Native American “seventh generation” principle, Buddhism, Taoism, Celtic practices, and Haitian Vodou, though it is important to mention here that I approach these traditions as a learner, not a representative.
Returning to the first voices
I intentionally began with the San and Khoikhoi peoples, among the oldest inhabitants of Southern Africa, whose cultural lineage stretches back farther than most histories we know.
Their languages, rich with click consonants, are among the earliest human speech patterns. Throughout history, they have lived in profound reciprocity with the land.
A gesture that changed my understanding
When a Bushman healer in their Tribe, pulls a plant from the ground for a ritual, they leave a gift in its place a lock of hair, a nut or saliva on dry earth.
The form doesn’t matter.
The gesture does.
Every time I take, I give more of myself back.
Such an exchange encodes abundance into the psyche, the sense that resources flow through us, not out of us, and that sharing is natural, not sacrificial.
That gesture stayed with me.
Once seen, it couldn’t be unseen. It demanded embodiment.
Living the regenerative path
For me personally, regeneration is not only a framework, it is a way of being. My own path toward this embodiment began in need for a deeper understanding. A need to touch the roots, not only the surface level.
My explorations are perhaps best described by the curve below:
I was growing.
In strength.
In perception of The World someone has built for me.
But at a certain point, I reached a turning point.
Literally and metaphorically.
I stopped and saw things as they are and I was honestly surprised by the abundance that surrounds me. The abundance of relationships and possibilities.
A turning point that opened up something wonderful for me, something I personally began to call:
The Era of Rest and Pleasure
I came to the conclusion that I don’t have to do anything. I only can.
I am, and that is the greatest value I bring to The World.
No wonder that right after opening up to this way of perceiving, I came across the book Life Is Real Only Then, When “I Am” by Georgij Gurdjieff, in which this Russian mystic shows that we spend most of our lives in a state of half-sleep, reacting automatically.
The state of “I am” means awakening, contact with one’s own essence, not with reactions or habits.
All those deep reflections wasn’t one night transformation. I went through many rituals and practices to get to this point of understanding.
Vipassana meditation to calm and clean my mind.
Mushroom ceremonies to cleanse and let go my traumas.
A burial ritual to leave my victim model in the ground.
I changed my surname to cut myself from the ancestral strain.
I drink ceremonial cacao almost every morning and organize ceremonies for my friends which has helped me to open my heart.
I do tarot and astrology readings.
I unleashed my thoughts through journaling, and thanks to this my inner voice is quiet now.
I did a 20-day only water fast to release the inherited fear of hunger, a war trauma passed down through my family line.
I even engaged with Haitian Vodou Loa Maman Brigitte and the god of steel and fire, Ogoun, but chose to take a break for a while when his power proved too strong for me to hold.
And many, many more.
I am grateful for each of them, as they have allowed me to sink deeper and deeper into the essence of life.
For now, I will share with you a glimpse of just two of the most crucial ones, with the promise that I will explore each more deeply in upcoming posts.
12-Hours meditation for love and dignity
The ritual that crowned my entry onto the regenerative path was a Metta Bhavana meditation in the Vipassana tradition.
This ritual had a special resonance.
I conducted it on my birthday as a symbol of dedicating this day to something greater than myself.
Why my birthday?
It’s evidently a unique day, a day when we receive blessings and gifts.
I wanted to reverse that. From the perspective of Judaism, birthdays are treated as “lucky days,” an occasion for reflection, gratitude, spiritual renewal, and a sense of “I am,” of belonging, of life’s meaning.
The symbolism aligned naturally.
I began the ritual at exactly 11:05, the time when I came into this world and took my first breath on this earth. The whole thing ended at 23:05 on May 23rd (23.05).
So there was also a beautiful synchronicity here.
Like even this wouldn’t be enough, at 3 PM that day, there was a full moon in Sagittarius, which spoke of how abundance and pleasure manifest through everything around us, it’s hard to resist it, hard to remain small, tight, cautious, when the world opens up before us in all colors.
The whole thing was planned as follows:
The first 4 hours: Anapana meditation, focusing on my own breath, calming the body and sharpening concentration.
1 hour lunch break, because even meditators must eat, and the whole point wasn’t to exhaust myself by force.
Then 5 hours of Vipassana meditation, slowly scanning the body and accepting all sensations appearing on it as they are.
And at the very end, when my mind was calm and sharp, 1 hour of Metta Bhavana, a meditation developing loving-kindness (goodwill) for myself and others, during which I evoked in myself a feeling of unconditional love and sent it out to the people I met at electronic waste dumps.
To me, electronic waste dumps represent the shadow side of our technological progress, and the people who live among them need, perhaps more than anyone, to be reminded of their inherent dignity and empowerment.
This meditation was dedicated to them.
The detailed stories from electronic waste dumps deserve their own telling. I’ll share notes from that journey in coming posts.
And because it was a modern ritual, the whole thing was of course streamed on YouTube.
One of the most boring streams on the contemporary internet. A woman sits, says nothing, and doesn’t try to sell you anything.
She just is.
Rebirth into conscious creator
The second moment that shaped my regenerative mindset was a ritual of dying.
A ritual in which I consciously buried my former self. The self who, taught by society, clung to the role of victim, which I played in many areas of my life.
The victim is a state in which we give away our own power.
We don’t do it consciously, but as an internal program encoded in emotions and the body, which perpetuates the belief that something external controls our lives, and we can only react.
From that state, blame becomes easy. Drama becomes magnetic. Agency dissolves.
So I chose to bury this pattern in the earth to let the Mother receive it, love it, and digest it.
Who emerged from that grave?
A person whose consciousness shifted from outside to inside.
A consciousness rooted in unity, inner freedom, and spontaneous flow.
An invitation to begin
I am sharing all this to clearly outline from what level I create, from what level I share my thoughts and reflections with you.
Why I am doing all this?
Because I believe that thing as simple as regenerative mindset is the key - the deepest transformation our society needs in order to thrive in harmony and create a healthy relationship with technology and life itself.
In Poland, where I come from, we have a saying: “Szewc bez butów chodzi” (The cobbler goes without shoes).
For me, this saying represents an old belief system, one that assumes we must put everyone and everything before ourselves.
This belief must die so something higher can take its place. The cobbler should wear the most comfortable shoes he made for himself, and inspire others to follow his path. This should be achieved not by hard work and sacrifice, but by simply being.
True wisdom comes from embodied experience infused with knowledge, the kind that builds trust and invites others into transformation.
Not abstract theories.
Not statistics.
But stories in which we can find the echoes of ourselves.
The technologies we build, the systems we design, the futures we imagine, they will only be as regenerative as the people creating them.
And that begins with you.
And with me.
With the willingness to let old stories die and to be reborn from higher level.
So here I am.
My name is Murzyn.
I was born naked and screaming, just like everyone reading this.
It will be my pure pleasure to share with you the thoughts, adventures, and reflections I encounter on this path, a path that leads toward enlightenment.
What can you expect in coming posts?
My reflections on shamanic practices translated into the architecture of modern technology
Tactics for reclaiming your agency from devices, platforms, and algorithms
Honest reviews of open-source tools: tested, broken, rebuilt, trusted
Stories from scientific conferences and hacker congresses where culture, code, and consciousness collide
I promise you this: old paradigms have no place here. So prepare yourself to journey into the unexpected (っ˘з(˘⌣˘ )
At the end, I want to offer a special gratitude to the plant Ajo Sacha, which accompanied me throughout the creative process of this text.
Used traditionally in Amazonian medicine for spiritual cleansing, releasing trauma, and supporting transformation.
This plant is particularly powerful in moments when our consciousness must let go of what no longer serves us.
Below, I offer a whistle song, created by Boa Yuxibu, in tribute to this sacred plant.