Institute of Network Cultures Book: Money Lab
“The Institute of Network Cultures (INC) analyzes and shapes the terrain of network cultures through events, publications, and online dialogue. Our projects evolve around digital publishing, alternative revenue models, online video and design, digital counter culture and much more.”
“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 cyber currencies and block chained 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.”
Institute of Network Cultures website
MoneyLab Reader 2: Overcoming the Hype, edited by, Inte Gloerich, Geert Lovink and Patricia de Vries (283 pages, PDF)
The economy is not working for most people
“Why do we need platform coops? A discussion about platform capitalism that only considers platforms is as inadequate as a narrow study of the mechanics of the as-sembly line meant to explain Fordism. The platform economy is inseparable from the condition of labor and the market failures and broader challenges of capitalism that platform coops challenge.”
A lack of digital workplace democracy
“Democracy is at the core of the rhetoric of Silicon Valley, and yet it is a far cry from being a reality on the Net. While the project of political democracy made inroads in many countries in the 20th century, the idea of workplace democracy has skipped the digital workplace. In fact, insofar as workers on app-mediated factory floors fall outside of the National Labor Relations Board’s definition of ‘employees’, workers in the sharing economy have lost the ability to unionize and collectively bargain — a step backward from the democratic gains of the labor movement.”
How to Coop the Digital Economy (page 199)
Platform Cooperative Resources
