Moneylab Reader 2
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MONEYL A B READER 2 OVERCOMING THE HYPE MoneyLab Reader 2: Overcoming the Hype Editors: Inte Gloerich, Geert Lovink and Patricia de Vries Copy editing: Ed Graham Cover design: Anastasia Kubrak Design: Inte Gloerich EPUB development: Inte Gloerich Printer: Drukkerij Tuijtel, Hardinxveld-Giessendam Publisher: Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam, 2018 ISBN: 978-94-92302-19-9 Contact Institute of Network Cultures Phone: +31 (0)20 595 1865 email: [email protected] web: www.networkcultures.org Order a copy or download this publication freely at: networkcultures.org/publications. Join: MoneyLab mailinglist: listcultures.org/mailman/listinfo/moneylab_listcultures.org. Subscribe to the INC newsletter: networkcultures.org/newsletter. This publication is supported by the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences and many crowdfunding donors. In particular we would like to thank Josephine Bosma, May Hen and Peter Lunenfeld for their generous contributions. MoneyLab Reader 2 is part of the State Machines project. This project has been funded with the support from the European Commission. This communication refects the views only of the authors, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein. Thanks to everyone at INC, to all of the authors for their contributions, Ed Graham for his keen copy-editing eye, Anastasia Kubrak for her exciting design, Leila Ueber- schlag and Nicoleta Pana for their successful crowdfunding campaign, and our part- ners in the State Machines project, Aksioma, Drugo More, Furtherfeld, and NeMe, for their inspiring work. This publication is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike 4.0 Unported (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0). To view a copy of this license, visit creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/. MONEYL A B READER 2 OVERCOMING THE HYPE EDITED BY INTE GLOERICH GEERT LOVINK AND PATRICIA DE VRIES INC READER #11 Previously published INC Readers The INC Reader series is derived from conference contributions and produced by the Institute of Network Cultures. The publications in this series are available in EPUB, PDF form, and a print run of 2000 copies. INC Reader #10: Geert Lovink, Nathaniel Tkacz and Patricia de Vries (eds), MoneyLab Reader: An Intervention in Digital Economy, 2015. INC Reader #9: René König and Miriam Rasch (eds), Society of the Query: Refections on Web Search, 2014. INC Reader #8: Geert Lovink and Miriam Rasch (eds), Unlike Us: Social Media Monopolies and Their Alternatives, 2013. INC Reader #7: Geert Lovink and Nathaniel Tkacz (eds), Critical Point of View: A Wikipedia Reader, 2011. INC Reader #6: Geert Lovink and Rachel Somers Miles (eds), Video Vortex Reader II: Moving Images Beyond YouTube, 2011. INC Reader #5: Scott McQuire, Meredith Martin and Sabine Niederer (eds), Urban Screens Reader, 2009. INC Reader #4: Geert Lovink and Sabine Niederer (eds), Video Vortex Reader: Responses to YouTube, 2008. INC Reader #3: Geert Lovink and Ned Rossiter (eds), MyCreativity Reader: A Critique of Creative Industries, 2007. INC Reader #2: Katrien Jacobs, Marije Janssen and Mateo Pasquinelli (eds), C'LICK ME: A Netporn Studies Reader, 2007. INC Reader #1: Geert Lovink and Soenke Zehle (eds), Incommunicade Reader, 2005. All INC Readers, and other publications like the Network Notebooks series, INC Longforms, and Theory on Demand, can be downloaded and read for free. See networkcultures.org/publications. CONTENTS Inte Gloerich, Geert Lovink, and Patricia de Vries Overcoming the Blockchain and Cybercurrency Hype: Introduction to MoneyLab Reader 2 7 UPDATING DIGITAL ECONOMY Patricia Reed Optimist Realism: Finance and the Politicization of Anticipation 14 Nina Power Necro-Capitalism and Counter-Images 23 Nathaniel Tkacz and Pablo R. Velasco Experience Money 31 BLOCKCHAIN CRITICISM Robert Herian Blockchain and the Distributed Reproduction of Capitalist Class Power 43 Jaya Klara Brekke Postcards from the World of Decentralized Money: A Story in Three Parts 52 Max Dovey Love on the Block 64 PERFORMING FUTURE FINANCE Martin Zeilinger Contemporary Art Between Algomysticism and Fintech Activism 74 Laura Lotti Financialization as a Medium: Speculative Notes on Post-Blockchain Art 87 Emily Rosamond It Sees (Notes Toward a Cultural History of Financial Vision) 101 David Hollanders The Reception of the Financial Crisis in Hollywood Movies 115 Max Haiven The Crypt of Art, the Decryption of Money, the Encrypted Common and the Problem with Cryptocurrencies 121 CRITIQUES OF THE GRAND SCHEMES Rachel O’Dwyer Things that Transact: How the Internet of Things is Transforming Payments 138 Brett Scott Cash in the Era of the Digital Payments Panopticon 146 Tripta Chandola The Demons of Demonetization: Devaluing ‘Trust’ as a Currency In Informal Economies, An Ethnographic Account 159 Silvio Lorusso First as Arts, Then as Tragedy — Two Cents on Personal Crowdfunding and Creative Entrepreneurialism 172 Nathalie Maréchal The Data Paradox: How the War on Poverty Became a War on the Poor 185 ALTERNATIVES IN FINANCIAL IMAGINATION Trebor Scholz How to Coop the Digital Economy 197 Dmytri Kleiner Universal Basic Income is a Neoliberal Plot to Make you Poorer 215 Patrice Riemens Precarity is the Present, Universal Basic Income the Future 221 Economic Space Agency On Intensive Self-Issuance: Economic Space Agency and the Space Platform 232 General Intellect Commonfare or the Welfare of the Commonwealth 243 APPENDICES Eduard de Jong, Geert Lovink, and Patrice Riemens 10 Bitcoin Myths 252 Platform Coops 257 MoneyLab Conferences 274 Author Biographies 277 INTRODUCTION 7 OVERCOMING THE BLOCKCHAIN AND CYBERCURRENCY HYPE: INTRODUCTION TO MONEYLAB READER 2 INTE GLOERICH, GEERT LOVINK, AND PATRICIA DE VRIES 8 MONEYLAA B READER 2 OVERCOMING THE BLOCKCHAIN AND CYBERCURRENCY HYPE: INTRODUCTION TO MONEYLAB READER 2 INTE GLOERICH, GEERT LOVINK, AND PATRICIA DE VRIES From place to place, to those many still left open, where there’s perplexity and darkness but also gaps and rapture… —Wisława Szymborska, Labyrinth Welcome to Overcoming the Hype. This second MoneyLab Reader prods emerging, rising, crashing and burning digital money memes. Ever since its inception, in 2013, the MoneyLab project tinkers with digital money and fnance experiments. We ques- tion persistent beliefs, from Calvinist austerity, growth, and up-scaling, to trustless automated decision-making, and freedom on the dark web, from (anarcho-)capitalist dreams of the days of yore to the special sauce of neoliberal entrepreneurialism and its right-wing libertarian counterparts. Entering the 10th year of the global fnancial crisis, it still remains a difcult yet crucial task to distinguish old wine from its fancy new bottles. We need to recog- nize the ruling fnancial system in its ostensible alternatives. Neoliberal concepts and convictions such as growth, scale and free markets are often repackaged in mystifying and depoliticizing wrapping paper such as ‘sustainable’, ‘parallel’, ‘local economies’, ‘co-ops’, ‘disruption’, ‘universal basic income (UBI)’, and ‘fexibility’ but lack or misfre structural and systemic critique, or cleverly shadow-box their way around it. We are ‘willing slaves of capital’, as Frédéric Lordon wrote,1 and if we trust the Believers, we will soon be (neo-)liberated by internet-based, autonomous payment systems or UBI. With the monopoly of Central Banks crumbling, the very defnition of money is up for grabs. MoneyLab considers blockchain technology, cybercurrencies and other experi- ments with value exchanges as spaces of political contestation and possibility. De- signing internet-based payment and network-based revenue models is a political proj- ect, and one with an equally important aesthetic program. MoneyLab asks designers, geeks, researchers, artists and activists: what role can criticism play when technology accelerates? And how can we work together to make a diference? Over the past years, the Cyberworld fantasies of yesteryear have been rekindled, in updated and automated form, in stories about invincible, decentralized blockchains and heroic crypto-currencies, promoted as a refreshed parallel universe of digital value storage that can weather any storm as well as overcome the incessant global fnancial crisis. This tweet by Brett Scott pretty much sums up the MoneyLab critique of the 1 Frédéric Lordon, Willing Slaves of Capital: Spinoza and Marx on Desire, New York, NY: Verso Books, 2014. INTRODUCTION 9 hype: ‘Crypto logic 101: Bitcoin is worth holding onto because it will become worth more Why will it be worth more? Because more people will start using it But aren't they just holding it, rather than using it? Yeah, but eventually we'll use it What for? To cash out into US dollars.’2 For many, such Bitcoin critique is Maoist-style self-criticism. There is not much intellectual clout in constantly having to ‘reveal’ the bubble nature of fnancial schemes. For fntech speculators, there is no deeper value in crypto-cur- rencies, only possible profts in buying and selling after an uncertain period of hoard- ing. For them, Ethereum is just another fnancial asset, accumulated under the sign of ‘collective self-interest’. The question of how digital money can actually be woven into the broader architecture of the internet is not their concern in the least. Due to speculation fever, the larger debate around what design of digital money would be desirable has come to a com- plete hold. What remains are security questions of wallets and exchanges, the use of crypto-currencies