READER A N INTERVENTION IN DIGITAL ECONOMY FOREWORD BY SASKIA SASSEN EDITED BY GEERT LOVINK NATHANIEL TKACZ PATRICIA DE VRIES INC READER #10 MoneyLab Reader: An Intervention in Digital Economy Editors: Geert Lovink, Nathaniel Tkacz and Patricia de Vries Copy editing: Annie Goodner, Jess van Zyl, Matt Beros, Miriam Rasch and Morgan Currie Cover design: Content Context Design: Katja van Stiphout EPUB development: André Castro Printer: Drukkerij Tuijtel, Hardinxveld-Giessendam Publisher: Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam, 2015 ISBN: 978-90-822345-5-8 Contact Institute of Network Cultures phone: +31205951865 email: [email protected] web: www.networkcultures.org Order a copy or download this publication freely at: www.networkcultures.org/publications Join the MoneyLab mailing list at: http://listcultures.org/mailman/listinfo/moneylab_listcultures.org Supported by: Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences (Hogeschool van Amster- dam), Amsterdam Creative Industries Publishing and the University of Warwick Thanks to everyone at INC, to all of the authors for their contributions, Annie Goodner and Morgan Currie for their copy editing, and to Amsterdam Creative Industries Publishing for their financial support. 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 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/. EDITED BY GEERT LOVINK, NATHANIEL TKACZ AND PATRICIA DE VRIES INC READER #10 Previously published INC Readers The INC Reader series is derived from conference contributions and produced by the Institute of Network Cultures. They are available in print, EPUB, and PDF form. The MoneyLab Reader is the tenth publication in the series. INC Reader #9: René König and Miriam Rasch (eds), Society of the Query Reader: Reflections 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 Matteo Pasquinelli (eds), C’LICK ME: A Netporn Studies Reader, 2007. INC Reader #1: Geert Lovink and Soenke Zehle (eds), Incommunicado Reader, 2005. All INC Readers, and other publications like the Network Notebooks series and Theory on Demand, can be downloaded and read for free. See www.networkcultures.org/publications. INTRODUCTION Saskia Sassen When Money Becomes an Extraction Tool Rather Than Exchange Medium: Foreword to the MoneyLab Reader 9 Geert Lovink and Nathaniel Tkacz MoneyLab: Sprouting New Digital-Economic Forms 13 THE LONG GAME Keith Hart Money in the Making of World Society 19 Franco “Bifo” Berardi Is There Life Beyond Money? 32 Ralph and Stefan Heidenreich On a Post-Monetary Network Based Economy 44 Douglas Rushkoff Playability and the Search for an Open Source Economy 56 Andrew Ross Accumulation and Resistance in the 21st Century 64 FINANCIAL INTERVENTIONS Primavera De Filippi and Samer Hassan Measuring Value in the Commons-Based Ecosystem: Bridging the Gap Between the Commons and the Market 74 Pekka Piironen and Akseli Virtanen Democratizing the Power of Finance: A Discussion About Robin Hood Asset Management Cooperative with Founder Akseli Virtanen 92 Lena Rethel and Irwan Abdalloh Inculcating Ethical Behaviour in Market Transactions? The Case of the Sharia Online Trading System in Indonesia 104 CRITICAL CURRENCIES David Golumbia Bitcoin as Politics: Distributed Right-Wing Extremism 117 Beat Weber The Economic Viability of Complementary Currencies: Bound to Fail? 132 Tiziana Terranova and Andrea Fumagalli Financial Capital and the Money of the Common: The Case of Commoncoin 150 Finn Brunton Heat Exchanges 158 ECONOMIES OF IMAGINATION Max Haiven Money as a Medium of the Imagination: Art and the Currencies of Cooperation 173 Stephanie Rothenberg Reversal of Fortune: Visualizing Marketized Philanthropy 189 Paolo Cirio (W)orld Currency 198 Jim Costanzo The Free Money Movement 202 TECHNOLOGIES OF PAYMENT Bill Maurer and Lana Swartz Wild, Wild West: A View from Two Californian Schoolmarms 221 Rachel O’Dwyer Money Talks: The Enclosure of Mobile Payments 230 Erin B. Taylor Mobile Money: Financial Globalization, Alternative, or Both? 244 Eduard de Jong, Nathaniel Tkacz, and Pablo Velasco ‘Live as Friends and Count as Enemies’: On Digital Cash and the Media of Payment 257 CROWDFUNDING AND BEYOND Inge Ejbye Sørensen Go Crowdfund Yourself! Some Unintended Consequences of Crowdfunding for Documentary Film and Industry in the U.K. 268 Renée Ridgway Crowdfunding the Commons? 281 Irina Enache and Robert van Boeschoten The MoneyLab Crowdfunding Toolkit for Creatives 295 APPENDICES MoneyLab Conference 304 Author Biographies 305 CRITICAL CURRENCIES 117 Bitcoin as Politics: Distributed Right-Wing Extremism DAVID GOLUMBIA 118 READER Bitcoin as Politics: Distributed Right-Wing Extremism DAVID GOLUMBIA Theorists of science and technology have long insisted that their objects of study can and should often be construed as profoundly implicated in, and at least in part consti- tuted by, the social systems out of which they have been produced and in which they are embedded. Frequently this perspective is hard to reconcile with what look to be obvious facts of common sense: jet rockets really do enable space travel, lasers really do read and write to digital media discs, transistors really do enable miniaturized digital devices, and so on; so what point is there to declaring that these objects ‘are’ social or political, as if somehow social or political will might have altered or prevented the objects from coming into being, or enabled space travel or miniature digital devices without the relevant technological underpinning? Yet it is hard to deny that political and social contexts play significant roles in the adoption and proliferation of technical devices and methods, and the line between these roles and the literal construction and operation of technologies is at best blurry. In his famous 1980 essay ‘Do Artifacts Have Politics?’ technology scholar Langdon Winner asked us to consider whether a ‘given device might have been designed and built in such a way that it produces a set of consequences logically and temporally prior to any of its professed uses.’1 For some technologies and in some contexts, this kind of dynamic can be hard to see, and the apparently common-sense insistence that technologies develop autonomously, as it were, continually urges us to reject the idea that technologies might be in part or even largely social constructions. This is the case even when the technologies themselves, as we see in so much promotion of computational devices and methods today, are advertised as having socially beneficial effects. Technologies are neutral, this view seems to suggests, when human beings use them for ends we (whoever ‘we’ are) don’t like; they are socially embedded and the result of democratic or social power (as determined, almost exclusively, by markets or market-like aggregations) when they are used for ‘good’ purposes (again, pace the fact that what appears good from one point of view may appear not at all good from another). In many ways, the very effectiveness of technologies is used as self-justifying evidence against the view that technologies might be deeply political, especially when the politics in question might be ones ‘we’ oppose. Bitcoin (along with the other distributed ledger cryptocurrencies of which it is the best-known and most widely-used exponent) provides us with an unusually pointed example of the relationship between the social and the technical; for unlike many 1. Langdon Winner, ‘Do Artifacts Have Politics?’, Daedalus 109:1 (Winter, 1980): 125. CRITICAL CURRENCIES 119 technologies critiqued by scholars, Bitcoin is not a technology that fails, either alto- gether due to errant premises (e.g. cold fusion) or, in part, due to social pressures (e.g. the Betamax videocassette format). Bitcoin is a technology that works – that is hard to doubt. Furthermore, it is widespread and being adopted at a furious pace. Yet despite all that, Bitcoin does not work – at least not as its advocates suggest it does. Bitcoin absolutely does something, yet it does not do what many of its advocates claim it does. Bitcoin is a technology whose social and political functions far outstrip its tech- nical ones. In this sense, Bitcoin can be seen as a technical object that is structured to an unusual extent by politics. Pushing this even further, there are salient perspec- tives from which Bitcoin appears to be mostly a realization of these political concerns: that is, whatever the software itself does, what ‘Bitcoin’ as a cultural object does is to promote a politics that is visible only if one knows where to look. In this sense, we can argue that Bitcoin is politics masquerading as technology, or technology solicit- ing and promoting a very specific politics, one that despite its public prominence has trouble penetrating fully into some of the social spaces into which