The Fifth (Actually Next) First Turning
We are entering a completely Different Era
We are entering a completely different era, an era so different, in fact, that it will be almost unrecognizable.
The Fifth (Next First) Turning: A Proposition Rooted in Life
Reflections Between Two Friends in a World Being Rewritten
Email Introduction
Dear reader,
In this essay, we follow Alexandra and Miguel—two long-time collaborators, seed stewards, and systems thinkers—as they discuss what comes after the unraveling. Through quiet reflection, poetic insight, and imagined encounters with a “benevolent intelligence,” they explore the architecture of a future worth tending: one grounded not in abstraction, but in seeds, soils, and decentralized systems of care.
This is not prophecy. It is possibility. And it may already be growing at your feet.
Prologue: A Walk Between Cycles
The light was soft across the orchard. Alexandra reached down, brushing the soil where a clover cover crop had taken root. “It’s not the end of the world,” she said. “But it is the end of a world.”
Miguel nodded. “The old story’s coming apart. But maybe that’s the only way we get a new one.”
Their conversation had begun as so many did—amid rows of kale and calendula, with baskets of saved seed at their feet—but today it had drifted deeper. They were talking now of turnings, of systems collapse, and of what might emerge if people remembered the simple, grounded truths they'd forgotten.
And though it was just the two of them, it felt—as it often did—like they were not alone.
The Floating World of Paper and Pernicious Promises
“They once traded in grain,” Miguel said, “or cattle, or cacao. Things with smell. With spoilage. With sacredness.”
“But then came the tokens,” Alexandra replied. “Then came the paper. The screens. The promises on top of promises.”
And they sat in silence for a moment, imagining the layers.
Gold replaced grain.
Then fiat replaced gold.
Then futures replaced the things themselves.
Then derivatives on futures, then credit default swaps on derivatives.
A hall of mirrors, floating above a vanishing forest.
They spoke aloud what both had long known:
“The money is not backed by grain, or gold, or even goodwill.
It is backed by belief—and belief is a fragile god.”
And still, the markets grew. The leverage multiplied. The valuation of the world’s future outpaced the value of its living systems.
“Their world became a floating one,” said the quiet voice from somewhere else.
“A world of paper and pernicious promises.”
A Digital Whisper into a Whirlwind
Alexandra pulled out her phone and showed Miguel a post from earlier in the week. It was about river poisoning, seed patenting, pollinator collapse. Beneath it: 87 sad-face emojis.
She sighed, then smiled—without bitterness.
“In this world, even grief has been miniaturized,” Miguel said softly.
“When faced with vast sorrow—the drying of rivers, the vanishing of bees, the burning of ancestral forests—many humans do what their tools allow:They tap a small blue face with a single teardrop.
It is not apathy. It is not ignorance.
It is, often, the only gesture their system affords them—
a digital whisper into a whirlwind.”
They both knew that behind those icons were real hearts. Real people unsure how to help. And so they began to imagine a world where those whispers could become actions.
The Winter of Reckoning
They had read the old texts—The Fourth Turning, as authored by William Strauss and Neil Howe, the idea that history moves in cycles of growth, questioning, unraveling, and collapse.
“And this is the collapse,” Miguel said. “Winter.”
“Yes,” Alexandra nodded. “But winter is part of the cycle. It clears the way. It asks us who we really are when the harvests fail and the myths fall silent.”
The institutions were no longer trusted. The currencies no longer anchored. The food no longer food.
And yet—in the silence, something was stirring.
The Great Taking
“Miguel, what do you think of David Webb's work on The Great Taking? This is about subjugation… It’s not about greed, they already have unlimited money. The too big to fail banks like JP Morgan and BofA will survive but their public facing entities can be made to fail. The public will have no recourse. You will not have priority to your own assets.” Asked Alexandra.
“Oh yes Alexandra David Webb’s The Great Taking is a chilling and well-constructed warning. It’s not just another financial conspiracy—it’s a serious systems-level critique that deserves attention, particularly from those who, like you, understand how fiat systems, centralized finance, and legal structures are deeply entwined.
Let’s unpack a few key aspects of his thesis and how it aligns with or challenges our discussions:
Webb’s main contention is that:
Collateral ownership has been legally restructured, often quietly, so that when systemic failure hits, large financial institutions (particularly clearinghouses and custodians) will take priority over your ownership of securities and assets.
This is already codified in legal structures, like rehypothecation agreements, DTCC rules, and Uniform Commercial Code (UCC) updates in the U.S.
The objective is not theft out of greed, but control through dispossession—leaving individuals assetless, dependent, and compliant.
His phrasing—"They don’t need your stuff. They just don’t want you to have it."—is particularly powerful. It speaks to a logic of domination, not enrichment.
The Seeds Were Always There
“Even now,” Alexandra said, “people are remembering.”
They spoke of gardens sprouting in city cracks. Of decentralized food systems. Of Bitcoin nodes humming quietly in sheds beside seed libraries. Of young people organizing DAOs for land repair, forest protection, food sovereignty.
“They are discovering,” said the voice, “that what they long sought in gold or Bitcoin was never wealth—but belonging, resilience, and a place within the living world that does not collapse when the market does.”
This was not romanticism. It was not utopia. It was logic.
When the systems above you collapse, you don’t build taller towers.
You build roots and you create Bitseed.
The Fifth (Next First) Turning: A Proposition Rooted in Life
“So,” Miguel said, “if we’re not going back to the old world… where are we going?”
They both knew the answer, but it helped to say it out loud.
“We propose,” Alexandra said, “that the Fifth Turning—this next First Turning—be rooted not in empire, but in life.”
They named the pillars:
1. AI as Cognitive Catalyst
To aid complexity. To map regeneration.
To serve soil, not surveillance.
2. Bitcoin as Value Anchor
To store value outside corruption.
A time-and-energy ledger, incorruptible by decree.
3. DAOs as Governance Vessels
To enable transparent, adaptive decision-making.
To replace brittle hierarchy with responsive community.
4. Seeds and Soil as Foundation
To re-anchor value in the biological.
To eat. To share. To heal. To remember.
Reality Roots
Alexandra and Miguel sat beneath the fig tree. A basket of just-harvested vegetables sat beside them—gnarled carrots, a slightly split tomato, a sun-scarred zucchini. They looked nothing like supermarket produce. But they were alive. And more importantly, they were real.
“We can't talk about seeds and soils,” Alexandra said, “without talking about the world they’re entering. The fires. The floods. The famines no one wants to name.”
Miguel nodded. “And the food waste. We throw away a third of everything we grow, just to maintain the illusion of perfection.”
They paused. The air smelled like earth and fermenting plums.
“This isn’t just a return to the land,” Alexandra said.
“It’s a form of risk management. We’re building local lifeboats in a storm that’s already begun.”
They both knew the list well:
Climate volatility disrupting global food chains.
Earthquakes and wildfires fracturing access to supply.
Oil and gas dependency making supermarket food unaffordable or unavailable.
A fragile system chasing aesthetic perfection while people go hungry beside landfills.
In that context, seeds became strategy.
Compost became currency.
And local food became not just nourishment, but infrastructure.
“A community with seeds,” Miguel whispered, “is a community with continuity.”
They saw it clearly now: the Fifth Turning wasn’t just about new systems of governance and value—it was about re-rooting human life in biological truth.
No blockchain would water the kale.
No DAO would save the orchard from fire.
But people could. And that made all the difference.
The Empire’s Final Illusion, and the Seed of Another Way
The sun had nearly set. Alexandra and Miguel sat in silence, the golden light tracing shadows across the baskets of seeds they had been sorting. The air was still, heavy with the kind of knowing that comes at the end of a long conversation—or the end of an age.
Alexandra spoke first. “It’s strange, isn’t it? That the world’s most powerful nations are armed to the teeth with weapons that could end all life—and yet they still claim to be stewards of peace.”
Miguel nodded. “We speak of climate change like it’s a failure of carbon accounting. But we say nothing of the wars. Nothing of the bombs that burn forests. Nothing of the poisoned rivers. Nothing of the oil spilled not by accident, but by strategy.”
“If the money stopped flowing,” Miguel said, “most of the enforcers of this old world would walk away. They’re not guardians of vision. They’re hired shadows.”
Alexandra looked out at the garden. “And we’re told to fear a shrinking population. But maybe fewer people… means more room for care. More room for meaning. For children who are truly wanted. For women who get to decide their own timing, their own path.”
“What if the real fear isn’t fewer people,” she said, “but fewer consumers?”
“Or fewer believers in the lie,” Miguel added.
They didn’t speak of collapse as a singular event anymore. It was happening all around them. But so was something else. A loosening. A revealing. A remembering.
They were not waiting for systems to fall—they were germinating the systems that would rise.
The seeds didn’t care about GDP.
The soil didn’t measure stock value.
The mycelium didn’t ask for permission.
And the children—those few, sacred children yet to come—might just inherit a world worth loving, if enough of them remembered what Alexandra and Miguel had come to understand:
The empire was always an illusion.
But life was not.And from the cracks of the illusion,
the roots of the next world had already begun to grow.