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title: ROBIN HOOD CRYPTO COOP - A WORKSHOP ON THE FUTURE OF THE DECENTRALIZED FINANCE

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# ROBIN HOOD CRYPTO COOP - A WORKSHOP ON THE FUTURE OF THE DECENTRALIZED FINANCE

SATURDAY 19.9.2020 13:00-16:00 CET

PLACE: ZOOM https://zoom.us/j/2022138511

The idea: intensive 30min mappings-drillings-brainstormings into the current landscape and how could the Robin Hood Crypto Coop position itself in the emerging landspace. Second session (two weeks later): creating the concept based on the analysis/mapping.

Developing experiments in the intersection of artists and economists

Political context of post crisis and austerity

PAst the era of producing goods, financialization of the world. Money logic intoxicating everything, but people had no say in it. We realized we needed a different realtion to finance that is expressive and creative, and that we have a say in it. 

We are all part of financialization of economy. There are no financial virgins, no outside. WE need to get involved with this too. 

We don't have acecss to its operating system, we have no pwoer in it. It would be very good to involve in money's flows and generation. 

That we need to access the operating system of finance. 

we want to take sacred things that only finance people could use, and go for it, grab it and play with it. 

Creating a monster that is assemblage of a legal identity and composure of culturally different elements.

Playing with cooperation tools. Cooperative history of Nordic countries. BEst form of governance that we have available, so that people who join the cooperative have a vote. 

Organizational form that belonged to the past century. 

A member to exit to get the money would take at lesat 6 months. One of the first realizations that this is not enough. Another problem is central decision making body- the board. 

Crypto- different organizational substrate, that allows us to different equity structures, assemblages, that correspond to the subjectivity in a different way. 

Also realized that this is not enough. We do need the brick and mortar interface to this in informational realm. 

The Finnish law sounds very interestesting on this respect. 

Legacy financial world and informational realm, the interface between them is hard to solve. 

In US,they formulated lomoted liabiltiy companies on blockcahin. But., Finnish cooperative law, enables issuing organization and governance, almost made for this kind of organization in crypto. 

Jyrki actaully drafted the new cooperative law. 

Our cooperative law is mixture of cooperative laws and limited liability laws. 
It is possible to modify the principles with or towards limited liability company principles, even up to companies in regulated markets like stock exchange. 

What has been in mind in draft, it is in a way fits to different places of an enterprise. Corporate- coop governance structuresl, can old fashioned investors, but also enterpreneur stakeholders, profit sharing with participants. The limits existing in cooperatives, transcended here.

Toolset to express different goevrnances. You can express limited liability, you can express the classical cooperative form of sharing, or some kind of hybrid.

The way you belong to a project, the way you share governance, the way you participate in goverannce, the way you open new opportunities, the way you share the upside. How that is designed, that is actual value offer. So, it is the governance tokens that have become super valuable in defi space.

Finnish cooperative law enables us to express governances in a way that is legall compliant. 

We would like Finland to become one of the key places where on-chain organzations are issued.

Cooperative law allows us to represent shares as tokens, and have this after market. 

If that's possible, it owuld be a big breakthrough in the way we can actually issue organizations and tokens in a way that can be offereed not only to accredited investors but also anybody who wants to join this cooperative organizations.

In most European companies, cooperatives can get tax incentives, but with high price in legislation to allow for more flexible ownership models. 

Finnish cooperative law also has benefits like the bonds. 


13:00-13:15CET Purpose and goals of the workshop / Ana Fradique

I MAPPING THE LANDSCAPE

Ana: Established the coop at 2012



13:15-13:45CET The Big Picture: What can we do when we live in a world we don’t understand? Designing for long volatility bias and exposure to fat tails, embracing and harvesting volatility, not wishing it away / Roberto Soundy

Opening exposure to upside volatility

Antifragility concept of Nassim Taleb

How we can build complex systems that are outside the dynamics of boom and bust capitalism. 

We can transition to what follows in this, certain phase of Robin Hood.

Practically, this approach of antifragility can be applied to RobinHood for surviving long term.

Designing with long tail volatility bias, doesn't mean ignoring short term volatility. Taleb doesn't go into this topic, his argument is more based on thinking about fat tails. 



13:45-14:15CET Cryptoecosystem: how to position there, what do we want to achieve there, what could differentiate us there? / Cem Dagdelen
-minimum viable concept
-creating different spirit inside crypto
-what could differentiate us?

Cem: Two components of design: One is derivative design, the other is systems design/organizational design/ governance. Composable mechanism design. The risk modulators that can translate short vol into long vol could take place. 

As we are taking banking structures out of th ecosystems, insurance networks take a very important take here. LEarning from this degen steroid culture, these insurance networks spring up creating incentives for their deployment. 

Post-state welfare design. Moving beyond state insurance, pensions, UBI type of redistribution mechanism.

In most of our projects in Curve LAbs, we try to embed productivity and volatility in antifragile sense into the token logic. 

If we look at Robinhood as an example, there is a generation of alpha that can be tied back to cybernetic infrastructure: like buy back mechanism, connecting algorithmic product to token. The relationship for the investory becomes more explicit, whereas speculator in ordinary markets plays the role of arbitrategour of assymetry of information. 

Robinhood leveraging its position of IRL, assisitng retail adoption of defi. With tokens, easy to keep its elegance and sustain.

The risks- issues.
-scalability: 
-use case of defi gentrifies the whole. ETh mem pool by exposing the dominance of leveraged positions, crowding out all the uses cases that might be developed on top of Ethereum. 

First thing that comes to mind is governance. 

We are facing the situation where defi becomes a DAO killer, while it actually tries to marry DAOs. 

Finance is the most easy use case to quantify- automate.

One other challange would be the systemic security. House of cards situation being born out of unique dependincies that have incredible maounts of vlaue locked to them, but also critical for systems built on top of it.
Risk of composability attacks.

Financial hackers finding ways to extract value from the system: flash loan attacks

Systemic audits: exposures for the whole system to be open to attacks. The problem with that is, innovation happening in such pace. 

The cultural aspect of risk. Alpha first- disregard values, security, social welfare. Horror scenario as an impulsive reaction, but actually a Degen culture.

The desire of buying your freedom out of system can be blamed, but people are not apologistic about it, because they can in fact do it. 


Akseli: Defi can't be the end game, looking for what comes after Defi. It is the asset side, collateral side. Where do the investments go from defi. Gramsci's critique, that banks decide where hte investment goes. 

cem: unlike central banking, legacy financial infrastructure, both the ownership and governance are happening in a much more stigmastic manner.Glimpse of truly free market movement, people building without any central coordination. Before, if you build the financial infrastructure, you are the state. In these markets, we see where can I take this market, that's why retail adoption is really interesting. DEfi can only grow to a certain extent with its current market segment. If you don't put inflows of attention from other areas, the growth will deflate. You cannot yield farm forever. 

Akseli: It's opened up the question of stability. The stability is not in the treasure bonds, but rather in the Alphabet stock. What used to be thought of center of stability is not the same anymore. 

Roberto: The issue of passive vs active investing. There is increasingly more evidence that there is some intuition that FR is propping markets in a particular way. The market equity put, so called. Starting to buy treasuries, doing it with more pervasive character. Passive investing has its own algortihm. The algorithm that we find from pension funds: if cash, then buy. When this happens in a more systematic way, the question for us, whether we are active or passive, how we can read the long-short vol. But also to think about distributed finance, regardlesss of not having FR, we need to think about how these passive bond yielding mechanisms may not be there, there may not be liquidity.

40% percent of participants are passive, compared to 2009, where it was 5%. What happens of 50%, who is gonna be sellers of these pension funds. VEry critical one to market capitalism. 

We commonly think about centralization of Federal space, but the other aspect might be more critical to its demise or survival. 

Cem: Automated strategies, Yearn finance vaults. Farming yields, converting them into principal. Creating algorithmic pension funds, which is very interesting paradigm.

14:15-14:45CET New subjectivities. How to relate to the “commons” space? Whoare the DeFi Degens, what do we want? / Felix Fritsch &  Ataberk Casur
-changing the tired “commons” discourse, bringing finance into it / Felix Fritsch
-DeFi degens: what are they, what do they want? / Ataberk Casur

BREAK

15:00-15:30CET Governance form and a legal framework as a value offer / Harri Homi & Tere Vaden
-the Finnish Coop Law
-EcoPetCoop experiment

15:30-16:00CET Legacy finance and capital: how to position there, what do we want to achieve here, what could differentiate us here? / Fabian Bruder & Akseli Virtanen

16:00-16:30CET Creating a space of cooperation and sharing knowledge (cf YFI) / Tere Vaden
-Learning, training together, trading together 
-Sharing signals
-Gathering a community (cf DeFi protocols)

Jonathan and Geert

German mailing list of ecanouts, synthesizing orthodox Marxism with Linux. Futuristic Marxists.

Geert: Coming from Amsterdam -- movement. 83' MA thesis, dealing with question of economics of alternative media. 

How an alternatiev organization can be truly autonomous, not only ideologically but also as a money. 

Developed tactical media: Shift your medium of expression. You do graffiti, next day podcast, expressing flexibility. 

With the start of internet, met DigiCash. The ideas that eventually this internet structure and payment systems will merge is a very old Amsterdam idea. Very convinced this was going to happen. 

Self organization with attention to sustainability.

95's, cocnerned that commercial takeover of the internet public infrastructure. Two years later, found ourselves in Dot.com boom. 

Akseli: From Nettime to MoneyLAb. What changed in organiziang this online cooepration?

Geert: 98-99' found that landscape was becoming more fragmented, but not in a bad sense, in the sense that enromous amount of people were coming onto the scene.

It was not general internet criticisim anymore, there were so many other things going on like cyber femiinsim, radio streaming events.Early attempts to stream video, the open source movement. 

In 2004, started the Institute of Network Cultures. Developed specific communities for various segments. Money Lab one of the created communities. 

2010-11, Wikilieaks starts asking for donations in Bitcoin.

Ibstacles on the way, monstrous social media thing happening, We didn't quite know what to do, where to look. With the urgency to focus on money issues, aftermath of cirsis. Then, the Moneylab thing came in. 

Akseli: with Jonathan

Extension of the network accompanied quantification of the world, expressed through money. 

the process of digitization, was technical and social change. Both as a response to forms of our control, but also communication netwrok which allowed people to talk to one another and organize together. Horizamntation, democratization of communication. 
This internet revolution has failed us. Why? As Benjamin taught us, after fialed revolution comes fascism. Any time you have a social media company, monetizing the value of interaction while users create, you get fascic emergence, consolidated as a power way. 

Is it possible to reinvent this revolution? 

Akseli: Digital revolution failed us economically. The informational and protocol layer called the economy remained untouched. 

Jonathan:  a conversion between expressive media and financial media has taken place. Protocols of digitization fit into protocols of capitalsit monetization. Indexing the process by which information is converted into profit. Attention brokarage forms.

Akseli: Attention workers, affective workers being extracted by platform owners. 

Jonathan: the very medias people use to communicate and organize are extractive structures. 

Akseli: there is nothing we can do, we cannot access them, we cannot reengineer them. Social media is already economic media. 

Geert: A social contract this. We get services for free, in exchange we give our data. WE are not aware of this social contract, so to make that contract explicit would be revolutionary itself. To make the extraciton visible, and generally aware.

One of the topics in Medialab in 97s, was critique of the eocnomy of the free. We were aware how this was gonna play out. We were also aware that the main dynamic was going to become advertisement. At the time, the dot com companies were actively establishing thee economy of the free, with a purpose. 

Akseli: Social media is laready economic media. But, the economic media is also already a social media. The moneyary media we have implies certain kind of social behaviours. If we take a network perspective on it, it is already a network:certain agents, acting according to certain agreements, like what is valuable. It is already a social media too. 

Jonathan: money understand as a medium, able to carry force. HAyek talked about telecommunication skill of money system.

This money ecosystem can be imagined as a netwokr. 
Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies made it clear that money also resembles other expressivem edia in wsya we dont ordinarily susptect. ITs correlation to attention economy. Validation and credibility is fundamental source of bitcoin's value. When we see bitcoin network, value being indezed to the narrative of what it can actually do, we see this is also how US dollar works, you can see again a narratiev, a network of poltiics. 

All messaging is collapsed into a very flat signal of price, a monologue. 

Akseli: Maybe we can redesign te conergence of this social and economic. The question is, si there a possbility for the media to be a post capitalist economioc expression.

Geert: Look at China- WeChat. We chat is the most directed attack at the heart of Silicon Valley. It created an economic system, it has certain elements of e-commerce for the people. Certain influencers on instagram, certain money flows, you can also see there, but it is quite primitve and Zuckerberg is not keen on extending that element. 

The whole mystic of the free disappears. Without the cryptoeeconomy, there are alreadyh social media interactions that point toward our direction. 

Akseli: crypto as p2p networking of protocols. Could we think crypto as a new kind of medium, programmable from below? 

to your book Jonathan, what was cinema, what is it and how does it connect to crypto movement. 

Jonathan: The medium promised to realize certain aspirations. Crypto could also be thought of as a medium in a weak sense, as being similar to photography, really in early stages of expressiity. Crypto because you can design that netowrk, and begin to venture into new ideas of social contracts, it actually emphasizes the fact that people can finally express their ideas in a monetary medium in a way that dint necessarily collapse into value form. 

we are in the very beginnings. Monetaery medium that can transfer value and organize density of information in the future. We are building towards that.

Akseli: Photography and cinema as mediums, they actually changed what art became. Photography questioned the primacy of language in the face of this image culture. 
II CREATING THE CONCEPT (Session 2, two weeks later)

Tokens as equity, misses the point. Tcrypto is opening the medium to change what economy is. 

We are gonna see postmodern economics. We are going to see surrealist economy, etc..

Akseli: Situating what we are doing to history of economics and finance. Economy has a history too. There is a history, which means, it most likely has a future too. To be able to be in a situation where things are opening up, they are becoming designable, traditional structures are breaking donw. New forms of funding investment, no clear cut as debt or equity. There is a disticnttion, derivatives adding moneyness to different assets. Then we have the intangibles, which are unaccantouble really, the big part of the value of the most companies right now. So, things are actaully on the move, what is happening in crypto, is logical steps further. Taking part in the engineering of what are these forms of doing this economically, is exciting to me.

Akseli: McLuhan, writes that medium is the message, so any new medium that arrives, it is the change in the pace and pattern, teh scale that introduces to human affairs, that's the message, the medium. 

Jonathan: The message is murder, the current economy as a result of our economy of media. It is also about remaknig the world system, allowing for expressivity to count in ways it cant count right now. They can't make it into the signal, if they can in a very devalued value form. The kind of derivative logics you are talking about, the questions of issuance, what if people could epxress themselves meaningful and valuable in a semiotic sense, but also able to transfer money. 

Geert: The eocnomic media, as a programmatic promise, to reorganize not only money flaws, but also actively redistiribute the world's wealth. And do that on a very basic level of protocols, code, infrastuructures. This is not just an idea that billionaries giving away their money. No. We want this distribution to happen bottom up. 

Akseli: We are seeing this in the defi space right now in fact. Let's spend a little bit there in what is goign on right now in the crpyto space. As ECSA, Bitcoin is in fact very one dimensional in how it creates value. 

Jonathan: If you think about the blockhain as a ledger, those are all messages, messages of much more complex economic activities. You can't restructure information already collapsed into the ledger. More robust form of archivaztion could actually preserve much more information. IF people could assemble their own structures of scripts of participation, they can begin to allow other values to persevere, rather than being collapsed into monologue in bitcoin.

Geert: the right wing dominance of people iin crypto in a way allowed us to come up with new designs. Why is it that they sidelined themselves to such a nextent, because they became obsessed with bitcoin as digital gold to hoard value, to turn into something that is primarily focused on internal trading, to create kind of a seperate space. Our promise is still p2p exchanges and transaction, and investments,d this crypto sphere as a sphere of transactions is still a promise. It is a radical promise, egalitarian promise. 

Jonathan: The sovereing subject as white masculinity, sovereing subject is the analogue of gold, absolute subject. 

Part of our job is to displace the nationness of the value form.

We are beginnign to decode ec ocnomic media in a way we analyze how it works, but we also have to remake it. Not importing back the forms of soveregin subject agency, for examle. 

Geert: We don't want feudalism, or any kind of 21st century digital feudalism. 

Akseli:We also found out that economic imagination is also hard. How to do it reminds me of decolonization of money. What do you mean by that?

Jonathan: Money is a form of extracting value.It creates profound alienation. 

We have to make our own money forms, embrace the power of sociality. There are som many resistance movements, fugitivity, for me the great resource is in the legacy of struggle against capitalism , against colonization. By remembering the idea of Randy MArtin's idea of social derivative. Understanding cultural wagers, artistic performative wagers, uncertain kinds of sociality, as kind of gambles in the space of volatility. Enter into cracks, create new alliances. Difficult ways of maintaining, people do it anyway, so if you culd build economy around them. 

Allow the decolonial energies in the world, to enter into space of organiztion and structure their own economies and futures.

Akseli: Organization strategies we have available in this precarity context. 

Geert: Other part of the work is also dismantling derivatives. After we understand and appropriate, we need to dismantle it. A lot of financial surfaces today have completely gone in a direction that has no reference anymore.

Enormours gap between unfolding economic crisis and thriving stock market has really marked 2020.  This mass awareness of thsi enrmous gap between fully autonomous financial services and the very harsh economic reality. 

Jonathan: REal arbitrageous on people's time. Networks biased in a way that people very few have power to have the authorship of writing these financial contracts. Specualation is not the problem, the problem is that only few people can speculate, and the rest dont have any say 

Akseli: Through these social derivatives, we need to open up the spread. What would it mean to live in the spread?

Jonathan: It would mean that we are able to put our part to wager in the futurity of that project. 

Geert: for the moneylab agenda, for me it becomes clear that we need to bring together this critique of global finance with our efforts to create, to code, to design new distributed forms of redistribution of wealth. At the moemnt, I see these two things as diverging. I think it would be very powerful if we could bring these two things together.

Jonathan: how can a MArxist think about monetary redesing, money is necessariliy evil they say.  I think th eechange in my own thinking, I realize that money is a communication medium that scales, has potentials and historical achievement. The fundamental problem is the system of extraction, which comes from unequal access of liquidity. 

Geert: Democratization of abstraction instead of extraction. 

Jonathan: Effervescence around tiktok production, to me demsontrates a capcity for self issuance and communcation. That is interestingly an act of abstraction also.; There is abstraction relation to other people, using codes, genre, .. 



[as part of the MoneyLab Helsinki]



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MONEYLAB #9 HELSINKI
Playgrounds for Post-Capitalism 
19.-20. September 2020



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MoneyLab #9 Discussions

I Cooperatives go crypto! A legal DAO-wrapper: The new Finnish cooperative law enables extremely flexible _issuing_of_organizations_ and having aftermarkets for their shares, here's how to get started. With Jyrki Jauhiainen, Ana Fradique, Tere Vaden [SAT 19.9.20 11:30am-12:30pmCET]

II From social media to economic media - collective organisation in post-capitalist times. With Jonathan Beller, Geert Lovink, Akseli Virtanen [SAT 19.9.20 16:30-18:00CET]

III What comes after Decentralized Finance? With prof. Dick Bryan & prof. Benjamin Lee [SUN 20.9.20 10:00-11:00amCET]

Dick: The project is saying, those of us who don't like capitalism, finding issueds of inequality, enironmental decline, the inability to alue anything that isn't profitable, to rely only in state subsidies. This has limited life. There are enough people out there who aspire to hae a differnet value. 

People want to oerthrow capitalism, but in the world of crypto economics, there are possbilities to deevlop an alternatiev inside capitalism. 

We can actually find a value of these creations- performances. We can build an economy that substitutes social value by profit.

How do you get people to nominate things they truly value. How do you give incentives for these to be produced, and for the system to grow sustainable.

Finance can be a major tool of change.

We find money to be issued by states. it took time for money to develop to banking. 

This was really elaborate banking in the time of REnaissance ITaly. Starting of the trade and funding exotic products. 

Akseli: What is being invented in the mid 19th century?

Dick: Formtaion of new rganizational forms in the stock exchange and shareholder. Scale, funding requirements got bigger. Inidvidual owners couldnt afford the whole funding, so they invented the fictitiois category of corporation, shares and equity. LLC.

This was a mechanism to defend risk taking by capital.

200 years of legislation in Britain, overturned to suddenly to allow joint stock companies to operate. When they were allowed, able to gather massive amounts of capital. HAve the aftermarket of shares.

Able to have a totally new kind of production to start to happen. 

Akseli: Able to get these factories going on, then they had to invent wage labor, integrating people into the factories, whole new mode of production was invented. 

Dick: Competition was also a driving force of capitalism, comp to innovate. Also focus on skilled labor. 

Akseli: What is going in the crypto world?

Dick: It started with the bitcoin whitepaper. What happened in 9 thousand years just happened in a decade. We have the bitcoin whitepaper, but still producing a centralized money system. 

Akseli: It did open the question that you could do something like money in a p2p way. 

Dick: Last 200 years, money defined in terms of stuff that state printed. We could all point to communes, comm organizations using their own money, but they were always in the margins, non scalable. 

Bitcoin was amazing innovation that no one could ever have imagined. It revealed this sociality of money. Now Decentralized finance.
It looks to me, it is being dominated by innovative people, but largely replicating the finanncial capacities of currently existing organizations. It is about moving risk around the board. 

Where is it all leading? You get a good return on your money, borrow against crypto assets, do all sorts of clever things to make derivatives on crypto. 

Akseli: From money to this banking protocols in Italy 14th century, to funding of the industrial production. In comparison, from bitcoin to defi, then what? What is missing?

Dick: What is interesting here is that we know the people attracted to defi, sorts of people who want the world different ,concerned about issues.  The issues we nominated don't get a mention in defi. You see defi projects designed. to provide income etc, but the organic nature of finance is not an alternative to capitalism. It is still capitalist finance. 

I think what inspires ECSA is sth is needed to reconcile social aspirations with these technical capacities. How are they going to come together to builda new sort of economy.  Surely there is going to be some possibility of having a social and economic reovlution such as in 19th century, and we are the ones talking about this.

Akseli: There is growing interest in the possibility of programmable economy, on the other hand there is hopelessness-despair about the current world situation, and these two things don't talk to each other. 

Dick:Alternative notions of value, profit organized production. 

Our challange is how do we replace and supplant profit, as the guiding source of production, so that it truly cares about the environment. How do we design an economy that would reward people's contribution to acitvities unaccounted for by cpaitalism.

Akseli: new era of production, how we find this new era of production. It must come after defi, that's the direction.

What kind of finance, what kind of funding does this kind of production requrie? It is gonna be about information, --

Dick: We need an economy that starts not with trade, not with buying and selling. It is not the right path, the right path is we gotta start from stake, from ownership. The notion of performance, that these performance, if they are staked, how much are people willing to stake performances to create outputs that have no price. That's how we get individual's appetite.

The mode of calculation is, we can put a value on this output, but the key doesn't come to prices, but going back to say , how much are they prepared to pay to have a stake? Involves use of options and swaps..

Akseli: We can use the logic of defi, financial protocols to create different socialities.

Dick: WE can say, we can trick the economy as a design space. we can theorize capitalism as one set of protocols, and we can reimagine these protocols. we can reimagine then otions with which individuals, agents come up with a good idea, come up with something they would like to perform, to test whether it has actual value, will people stake it?

It is going to be compelx obviously. Sociality comes when you say the network as awhole has a mechanism to determine what the value of these outputs are. The risk we are taking, the thing we are staking is, what will the rest of the network think of this output? 

Dick: It reuires the use of options and swaps. If you think about stake, stake has option like characteristics. I is taking an exposure, sharing in the success or failure. The swap element is also important, individuals can go about producing their own performances, and if we can design a system where performance exposures can be swapped in the netowrk. Rate of return on social value, is converted to general social return, so that everyone has exposure to everyone's partial success. 

Akseli: Financial instruments, we are using them to redirect risks, upside, that's kind of what we can do with these instruments. What makes these financial instruments so adequate, so interesting, that you can organize things with them. 

Dick: We are doing defi towards a particular purpose.

Akseli: what makes financial technology, derivatives, in interesting way that we must use them. We know that post-capitalsit economy will be financial. 

Dick: What fabulous about derivative financing, is that it means things that we thought as a whole, whether a afactory, bond or a hosuehold, if you think of them as financial logic, you can break them down to various exposures. Which risks do you want to hold, which do you want to lay off? We decompose, we dividuate these attributes. 

Financially, we are decomposing them. 

That's what defi is doing, which risks individuals hold, and which risks should be socialized.

In the crypto world, the prepensity to gravitat towards individualism has been strong. But for alternative society, also need to take account of the social. 

Power of deriavtives to make conscious design choices to match the social and individual. 

Akseli: Not only manage, but also design the way you want to do things together, share the upside and the risks of what you are doing. 

Dick: Imposing the social, sounds like centralized control. We are maintaining the integratiy of distributed. The level of social should itself be subject to evaluation by indiviudals. We desing something which ahas a social, but no prescribe for that. 

Akseli: What are the consequences to decision making, compared to how decision making under uncertainity is thought under finance. Different way of being in the economy. 

Dick: As a mindset, decision making under uncertainity is aesthetic. We are concerned with dynamics, the opennes. We want to focus on potential, the flows, focus on performances, processes of creativity.

That comes after defi. 

Akseli: We have a question: 

Audience: Is what you are proposing how is it differnt from a variation from existing social impact bonds? Secondly, if we are imagining differetn economy beyond profit, I'm quite curious about derivatives and options.

Dick: When we loo kat social impact bonds, they have interesting formula. The notion is that, in a social impact bond, an investment will be undertaken because the state wants to pass the risk over. Then the state takes the information, then can acutally design policies for the future. You can't keep having the social impact bond with same issue over and over again. --

Audience: Contracts by definition exist because of potential conflict. Who comes in when things fall apart in these contracts? Another point, this idea of risk, what you are proposing is beyond risking together, thinking beyond the idea of risk. Poor people cna't afford to risk. We can be optimist, say let's risk together. but at the sametime, also important to consider the flipside of the risk.

Akseli: how do shadow banks handle it? 

Dick: This economy we are talking about operates inside a cpiatlist economy. People will operate in both economies, so all the rules of the state will still apply. Having said that, the point you are raising is really important. When we are talking about an economy of staking, we are also talking about economy of mutual issued credit, but collateral is also key. If onwership, staking is diversified, if there is incentive for evry agent to sell of stake in their performance, there is also incentive to have stake in others' performances. This is the notion of risking together, diversifying colalteral. 

The whole notion of alternative economy is to say, we gotta take risks, we gotta take calculative risks. The poor and less poor, can share mechanisms.

Akseli: What counts as liquid, what counts as colalteral. If we can open these things, then we can talk about post capital financial system.

Dick: We want to break those open.

Audience: The notion that this is possible within the existing capitalist system, and the monetary system, from my perspectiev the structure of financial system is so broken, beyond repair, when it comes to average person's interest, even though you want to create something within it, you cant break the structural problems. The monopoly to issue money, for example. The social value, bypassing profit, I sort of question if it is possible, and while I think I would like to look into these things you use as a tool to address these things, I also think that they are not acesible mentally to the average person, who has a problem of understanding even understanding simple financial equations. To require them to be fluent in risk allocation, commodification, there is saying if it is not accesible to poor it is not radical. 

Dick: Criticial to our analysis, ther eisn o formal money. We have mutual issuance of credit. It involves no banking, fiat comes in a s a commodity , not as money. 

On the issue of options and swaps,I think we need to talk about daily life as dominated by options and swaps. People never think about the analytical proposition behind them, but they use them everyday. IF we can program these in a way that look like commonsense.

When these things communicated, it needs to invoke highly sophisticatd finance, but it is already buried in our lives. 

Akseli: We are able to define logic and protocols, and open access to that grammar. Think about tiktok. How do you engage with risks, options, everybody playing, opening up opportunities, seeing reviewing what others are doing.

Audience: What I'm afraid of, what has happened in the past, is that the answers sophisticated are gonna be talked into contracts, and used as a tool for exploitation against the poor, passing them bad contracts.Extract value from the crowd without the crowd knowing it. 

Dick: What you are sayingis a really important caution about the direction defi is taking. Let's just say,I believe what we are designing in ECSA is cognizant of that. It is by design to take account the cautions you are rasiing. 

Can we believe that we are not vulnerable to that problem, people will ask.

Audience: Create products, that contain certain practices that are good, so that even an idiot can understand and use easily.





IV Experiments in Governance. With Ela Kagel, Primavera De Filippi, Nathan Schneider, Colin Drumm, Pekko Koskinen [SUN 20.9.20 16:00-18:00CET]

Reimagining and creating accesss

The topic of governance comes in so many levels.

Organization of creating network structures. The whole project itself is also a challange of governance.

Code is law naivety. If code is law, who decides on the code governs then. Whatever you design on a platform, it will form a governance around it, irrespective of the governance model.

Education as a consumption good. Entertainment source also. 

We are used to think about it as an investment good, but it is not expensive.

Creating a culture where learning is pursued. 

How do you disintencivize click bait, we donit want everything bad in twitter replicated here.

University and academia as a aquestion of how do we organize  out knowledge.

What is missing in governance?
Understanding of centralization/decentralization. More sophisticated evolution than good/bad. That distributed systems can be re-centralized.

Functionings of cooperation.

Economic research into these areas.

How assets are controlled, who has access to them?

Unless you design a new way to own houeses (dominant asset group in US) you will be trapped into the same logic.


How can we replicate participatory village-community scale organizations online? 

How do we have the texture of governance as everyday interaction? 

Increasing the literacy of our organization, our governance tools. 

we need a space where builders/creators of governance experimentation can meet people working/researching on legacy governance forms.

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MoneyLab is an international network of artists, hackers, designers, economists and activists who explore forms of financial democratization. The 9th MoneyLab will take place in Helsinki on September 19-20, 2020.

Moneylab #9 Playgrounds for Post-Capitalism - Economic Expression for Everyone! starts from the situation where our core economic infrastructure is moving fully onto a programmable medium. In short, the economy is becoming programmable. What does this mean? One way to think about it is this: just like social networking applications gave us social media, the emerging economic networking applications will mean the birth of economic media. How we relate to each other economically will be remediated by applications in exactly the same sense that our social relations already are. Crowdfunding, p2p lending, cryptocurrencies, liquidity farming, automated market makers, smart pools, DeFi and DEXs are just the first baby steps of this transformation. 

The economy and its key conventions - money, markets, debt, equity, liquidity, who can issue and clear, how are we organized together and share the risks and upsides, what counts as liquidity, what counts as collateral, what counts as value and who decides about these - are opening up as playgrounds for expression. And we want to express, experiment, play, speculate and fabulate! We want to profanate finance: return it to common use and play! 

Marshall McLuhan (1964) famously said that “the message of any new medium is the change of scale or pace or pattern it introduces to human affairs”. In MoneyLab #9 we want to ask: If the media is the message, what is the message of economic media? What change of scale or pace or pattern does it introduce to human affairs?

It is clear that post-capitalism will be a financial system. And that only a critical appropriation of the language and protocols of finance can bring forth the subjectivity required to move post capitalism. Perhaps the real potential of cryptoeconomy and decentralized finance is here: that it allows us to start creating social derivatives, collective risk generating and arbitraging practices, speculating and leveraging on our capacity to act together, on a certain gap or on opportunity, and collectively enjoy the upside.   

MoneyLab #9 addresses potential tools that we have available, from experimental digital cooperatives to new cryptographically enabled organizational forms. We also experiment with the possibilities of games for prototyping economies: How could play get us beyond theory and bridge between creativity and practical realities of future, people-driven economies.

Money Lab #9 invites you to discover your place in the economies to come. We are all needed -- these economies won't be made without us. 

Money Lab Helsinki is co-produced by m-cult and Economic Space Agency (ECSA) in cooperation with the Institute of Network Cultures (NL), Supermarkt Berlin (DE) and Oodi Central Library.
