MoneyLab Reader 2: Overcoming the Hype (2018)

“MoneyLab is a network of artists, activists, and geeks experimenting with forms of financial democratization. Entering the 10th year of the global financial crisis, it still remains a difficult yet crucial task to distinguish old wine from its fancy new bottles. The MoneyLab network questions persistent beliefs, from Calvinist austerity, growth, and up-scaling, to trustless, automated decision making and (anarcho-)capitalist dreams of cybercurrencies and blockchained solutionism.

We consider experiments with digital coops, internet-based payment and network-based revenue models as spaces of political imagination, with an equally important aesthetic program. In this second MoneyLab Reader the network delves into topics like the financialization of art; love as a binary proposition on the blockchain; the crowdfunding of livelihood; the cashless society; financial surveillance of the poor; universal basic income as the real McCoy or a real sham; the cooperative answer to Airbnb and Uber; the history of your financial dashboard; and, Hollywood’s narration of the financial crisis. Fintech rushes through our veins, causing a whirlwind of critical concepts, ideas and imaginaries. Welcome to the eye of the storm.”

Contributors: Jaya Klara Brekke, Tripta Chandola, Max Dovey, Economic Space Agency, General Intellect, Max Haiven, Robert Herian, David Hollanders, Dmytri Kleiner, Silvio Lorusso, Laura Lotti, Nathalie Maréchal, Rachel O’Dwyer, Nina Power, Patricia Reed, Patrice Riemens, Emily Rosamond, Trebor Scholz, Brett Scott, Nathaniel Tkacz, Pablo R. Velasco, Martin Zeilinger.

Edited by Inte Gloerich, Geert Lovink, and Patricia de Vries
Publisher Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam, 2018
INC Reader series, 11
Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 License
ISBN 9789492302199, 9492302195
280 pages

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CODE: Collaborative Ownership and the Digital Economy

Open source software is considered by many to be a novelty and the open source movement a revolution. Yet the collaborative creation of knowledge has gone on for as long as humans have been able to communicate. CODE looks at the collaborative model of creativity—with examples ranging from collective ownership in indigenous societies to free software, academic science, and the human genome project—and finds it an alternative to proprietary frameworks for creativity based on strong intellectual property rights.

Intellectual property rights, argues Rishab Ghosh in his introduction, were ostensibly developed to increase creativity; but today, policy decisions that treat knowledge and art as if they were physical forms of property actually threaten to decrease creativity, limit public access to creativity, and discourage collaborative creativity. “Newton should have had to pay a license fee before being allowed even to see how tall the ‘shoulders of giants’ were, let alone to stand upon them,” he writes.

The contributors to CODE, from such diverse fields as economics, anthropology, law, and software development, examine collaborative creativity from a variety of perspectives, looking at new and old forms of creative collaboration and the mechanisms emerging to study them. Discussing the philosophically resonant issues of ownership, property, and the commons, they ask if the increasing application of the language of property rights to knowledge and creativity constitutes a second enclosure movement—or if the worldwide acclaim for free software signifies a renaissance of the commons. Two concluding chapters offer concrete possibilities for both alternatives, with one proposing the establishment of “positive intellectual rights” to information and another issuing a warning against the threats to networked knowledge posed by globalization.

CODE: Collaborative Ownership and the Digital Economy
By Rishab Aiyer Ghosh
Edition: illustrated
Published by MIT Press, 2005
ISBN 0262072602, 9780262072601
345 pages
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Review (Michel Bauwens)

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Tiziana Terranova: Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age (2004)

“In an age of email lists and discussion groups, e-zines and weblogs, bringing together users, consumers, workers and activists from around the globe, what kinds of political subjectivity are emerging? What kinds of politics become possible in a time of information overload and media saturation? What structures of power and control operate over a self-organising system like the internet?

In this highly original new work, Tiziana Terranova investigates the political dimension of the network culture in which we now live, and explores what the new forms of communication and organisation might mean for our understanding of power and politics. Terranova engages with key concepts and debates in cultural theory and cultural politics, using examples from media culture, computing, network dynamics, and internet activism within the anti-capitalist and anti-war movements.

Network Culture concludes that the nonlinear network dynamics that link different modes of communication at different levels (from local radio to satellite television, from the national press to the internet, from broadcasting to rumours and conspiracy theories) provide the conditions within which another politics can emerge. This other politics, the book suggests, does not entail the production of a new political discourse or ideology, but the invention of micropolitical tactics able to stand up to new forms of social control.”

Published by Pluto Press, 2004
ISBN 0745317499, 9780745317496
208 pages

Reviews: Wright (Mute, 2005), Zeffiro (Canadian Journal of Communication, 2006), Jackson (Participations, 2008), Wark (Public Seminar, 2015).

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