It for me the the story, though is, political and it's also personal. So I'm telling my story, but it's also, you know a political reading of, of the times. Hard to say where it starts or beginnings always difficult but for me it would be early eighties my involvement in a lot of social movement and squatting in particular. I was studying political science at the time at the University of Amsterdam and I graduated in '83 with a thesis on the let's say political economy of publishing. And the the question of how social movements could build sustainable forms of income, of distribution, or and what at the time, was called, you know, alternative economy. And that's, of course a very broad, broad term but for us at the time it was very concrete because we were running, you know, we had a lot of cafes, restaurants, theaters, printing houses, publishing houses. We had to of course are on, you know pirate radio stations a number of them in fact. We were producing films and videos a lot of stuff and so this was a movement at the time maybe around 10,000 people in Amsterdam alone you know were living in in squats and were actively involved in, in in building and maintaining, these, infrastructure. So I I focused really on the question of the the maintenance, and the financial side of it. How how do you how because we were running a weekly it was it had a circulation of 2,000. It's called bluff and so yeah we we had a quite a number or years of experience already how how to do that. So after that I kind of switched really and lost my interest in the social sciences and really moved to the arts and humanities. And then as you said, yeah around '85 or '87 I became or decided to become a European media theorist. I have no idea what what that would, you know, entail. But, yeah, I was, unemployed Mhmm. And I lived off the doll like many, many others of my, generation. It was a particularly dark time and no jobs around whatsoever. And so, yeah, I was on on the dole for nine years, to be honest. So that was a long time. Not always, you know, I'm I'm not romanticizing it in any way, but the cost of living, of course, especially housing, was low. Right? So this is the only reason why, you know, we could we could essentially do this, but we also kept it low. Right? And we thought about, the question of of money very carefully. Mhmm. And so this is where where for me, you know, where all this, we're we're gonna talk about here is actually, you know, originating. Then, yeah, in '84, I I had my first, you know, personal computer, and then, I started to, you know, working on it. In '87, I, yeah, purchased a new one. So, one that was really my my own. The first one I shared with others, and, yeah. Some years later, I purchased a modem. And that, of course, that was a very important moment because, it was not just, you know, for data processing or something for writing or doing other stuff. But, yeah, by, '89, '90, yeah, we I started to participate in in bulletin boards and we started really to connect, and build, the networks that, you know, in way already existed. But before that, of course, we used other things. We used telephone, fax, we used, yeah, of course, meetings, in, in person and so on. Right? So the idea of networking was, of course, already, quite advanced. And so in the late eighties we just suddenly got another technical tool, to do this. And so to connect computers, was something that was, something, you know, was long in the making. I remember very well the very first time I touched the computer was already in the early 70s. So it really goes back, right? So we're talking already when the modem arrived we're already talking about, you know twenty years basically of computing. But of course ordinary people, you know, they didn't have so much access to it. So it was really a question of, you know, access. And our provider was called Access for for all. Right? So this is yeah. And I I decided to meet you know hackers and programmers and in '89 I was part of a big hacker, convention called the Galactic Galactic Hacker Convention Mhmm. In Paradiso in Amsterdam. So this is where a lot of the, let's say, early players Mhmm. Came together. And there I also met of a few characters. And in the early nineties, one of them, was David Chang. So, yeah. And I, interviewed him, like we do, right now, back in 1992 because, some friends of mine of mine worked, for, for his company that was part of the University of

based in the Institute for mathematics and information, CVE. And this company was called DigiCash. And so, yeah. So funny enough, for those who are interested, my interview with David Cham is is available on on the internet archive. And so so this was this was the first time when we started to connect let's say computing and networking with the question of of economics and payment systems. Right? Mhmm. And so because my friends were working at at DigiCash, yeah, I was very early on aware of it and also remember a decade earlier, I already wrote my thesis about this. So from the very very start of the internet well before the world wide web, we entered this field, with the awareness that, you know, this would have to become financially sustainable for those, who would be, who would be involved.

for it to work, if I remember correctly. How did you cash Well, it was not a, you know, a currency. But, I want to note here that, the employee which was most closely involved, is a guy who's still around and who is a member of the money lab community from day one. And his name is Edouard Dion and he is still involved in in writing code, in producing, you know, models for for everything, you know, you and I will talk about here. And, you know, so he is, he's still around and so that's in itself interesting. And by the way David Chama is also still approachable. He's still alive. Although, you know, he eventually moved back, to California. Maybe it's interesting to note that he was one of the generation of the, of the Americans who fled the The US because he didn't want to go into the army. This was during the Vietnam war and this is how he ended up, in in Amsterdam.

Yeah. I know. City went downhill. Yes. And so that is in itself a very unfortunate history. I wouldn't say, you know, it's a lost battle because the the movement around, you know, housing, gentrification Mhmm. Is strong. Since over ten years, squatting is forbidden, but we're we're still squatting. And Yeah. My institute is also actively taking part in that. So we're we're still part of that struggle even though, as you say, you know, there's an enormous amount of terrain that has been lost and prices are ridiculously high. Mhmm. But people are fighting back. Yeah. Yeah. But,

Yeah. And and thinking through it, I was and still are, I'm I'm still very much focused on the German, context and, already in the late seventies and early eighties, the thinking about this was, already, very well, advanced. And it somehow coincided, with, what, you know, at the time was called, the crisis of, of Marxism. But a lot of people, saw the crisis of Marxism at the time also as an opportunity and not just as a loss or something like that. Right? I need to really emphasize this because a lot of the social movements, especially those involved in in ecology, in feminism, in the anti nuclear struggles, in squatting, really, you know, took up a lot of the, the notions. And I think the yeah, the notion that for me, then, stood out in the nineties was, our effort to really, get a grip on the political economy, of the Internet. So we started doing that, and we Pitt, Schultz, and I, we started the Nettime mailing list, in 9495, and this was one of our explicit aims. I want to say that, you know, the Nettime mailing list, we're very proud of that. It still exists. It's a large community, and it, it continues, these, conversations. So now over, you know, a thirty, thirty year, period. So because we, we entered the very early Internet with that, scope, a few things were were very very striking. I myself worked with the people that founded, Wired. They lived in Amsterdam. This is not so well known. Really? Yes. So Wired is a magazine that comes from Amsterdam. And at the time, it was called Electric Word. And, I was involved at the time in a media, or video art magazine, called Mediamatic. And we were very close. It was the same scene. We shared office and so on and so on. Right? So these were Jane and and Louis, and they, in late, in '92, they moved to San Francisco to start Wired magazine. And some some of they took some of us with them and others remained. Right? And, at the time, we were already quite, aware, about the circles in which they ended up. And, this was, the circles that, was a transformation of a very kind of old school venture capital. Because there is I want to remind people here, there is old school venture capital which already existed in the nineteen seventies, '80 seventies, and eighties. Right? For us, a lot of yeah. Venture capital really only comes into being, around the mid nineties. Right? Right. But Yeah. But there is there is there is there are, roots that go, go back, earlier. And so, so we found out that, they started to have access to to, very strange money. Very, you know, it was not banks. It was not, yeah. They wouldn't just start a company. Mhmm. Right? Yeah, because that's not what you do. You know, when you are, in venture capital circles, you don't start just a company. Right? Right. It doesn't work like that because, yeah, it's all about financing. Financing. Right? So you start fine you start with the financing model in a way and the companies doesn't really matter. It comes later. Right? Because you need to have an idea. You need to have yeah? Yeah. You need to have the white paper. We we know that by now. Right? But, yeah, at the time, this was something, quite, esoteric, secret. Yeah. And especially in '92 and '93, especially in California, this was a scene, that was kind of in the making. And, you know, you can now read a little bit more about it. In general, I would say, there's not enough, historical work yet done by it. The only book is, you know, from cyberculture to from counterculture to cyberculture. Mhmm. But, yeah. By the way, a very interesting, one that I want to mention here is also, Paulina Borsuk book, because she she is one of the early, writer writers of, of Wired, which then, in late ninety nine or February wrote her memoirs, let's say, of the nineties. And then in this book, you can read, a little bit also about the, the early time. However, by '94, '95, the the way of funding and the way the the what we then called political economy of the internet started to really take shape, right? Mhmm. And it's well known and this culminated then in the so called IPO of, of Netscape. Right? Which is kind of seen as the beginning of, of the .com hype. Right. And that was started by Marc Andreessen who is the Exactly. Head of Anderson Horowitz who is Yeah. Yeah. So he was there at the at the very, at the very beginning of of all this. Important there was for us that, this kind of mysterious or esoteric part, remained the core of the operation. Because, it was all about, not money that you would invest in the traditional sense, You know? It was all about what at the time was called funny money. It was money that was that was somehow there. It was liquid. It was invisible. It it the the numbers were incredible. Right? What were they investing in? There was no business model. Right? There was no, there was no, no idea that if you would invest something, you would have a return. Right? This this, the whole idea, was, skipped. And that led us then, already in, I would say around '97, '98, we started to, get a better Mhmm. In which, you know, you would basically just create an enormous bubble. You would just invest it doesn't really matter in in what, right? You would give away everything for free, right, with the sole aim of course which you know took a while for us to figure it out, to create new monopolies, which would then later on you know sort out how they would get the money back and then also how they would make insane amounts of money because they would not have any competition. So it was very early, from very early on it was clear that this was not about markets. It was about eliminating competition. Mhmm. So the whole venture capital model, was incredible money, you know. The size yeah. The sheer size of what was for us was really difficult to to understand. And, yeah, that then culminated, of course, in in .com mania, which, you know, at the time, yeah, we we extensively, you know, documented it. And, so I also wrote my, you know, my PhD thesis, in part, about this. Yeah. So that time from, let's say, from '95, '96 onwards, is quite well, documented. Right? It's a it's an absolutely crazy time, with, in insane amount of money, invested in in in hilarious companies that pets.com. Pets.com is the yeah. It's the classic. It is the classic. And so, but yeah, it would be very very interesting to kind of map, the time just just before that, you know? So so so the time that I'm just referring to now would be from '92 probably, to '95. How this system which is now still ruling, you know, the world basically, the whole venture capital driven model, how, you know, how they they themselves, gained an, you know, financial hegemony. And essentially, also they have still have a monopoly, over the way we think in how a company in this context Mhmm. Be it, blockchain, AI, big data, it doesn't really matter what. Yeah? How it should be founded, how it should be, financed and governed. Right? They set the parameters and, yeah, I was very unfortunate to see that throughout the blockchain, you know, ecosystem, this model was not really a question nor would people really have an idea where it came from and, you know, what its premises

Yeah. It is true that ICOs are based on another model. I doubt myself really that they were created out of a, you know, a thorough critique of the venture capital model itself. So that that is that is maybe less, less the case. And also, remember at the time already in the eighties and also in nineties, we were quite focused on long term sustainable financial models. And, so we were in that in that sense, quite wary of anything that, you know, promised big returns, get get rich, quick, schemes. Right. So, in that sense, yeah. And that that's, of course, a much older and and broader debate, which you could say also, you know, centers around, the accelerationists in a way, you know, because the accelerationists, have a much more positive approach to certain bursts, let's say of scaling, yeah, scaling up. And, yeah, even though we we believed that, you know social movements themselves, you know, sometimes, you know, go through such, you know, very turbulent moments of growth, we believed that social movements could and can only survive if they work on long term sustainable infrastructures to, yeah, to in a way to survive exactly these, booms and busts that, you know, exists. Of course, it is true. Look look at Occupy Wall Street or something like that. It was, you know, big in, in 2011 and early twelve and and then of course it went down right. Movements all have these ups and downs however if you've been around long enough you'd know that you know, the the way to, to survive that is is to to build, structures underneath that can also then, let's say, transfer, notions, critical, experiences back to, others and of course can be, transferred to new generations because this is how, yeah, is in the infrastructure you, you embed experiences and, this is what we'll see now, you know, if there will be, a next wave of, crypto, blockchain, whatever. Right? All we want is really that, the experience from the last ten or so years, yeah, will be, of course transferred to to the next generation so that they can at least learn something from the previous experience. And this is what what we did. And and this for for me then culminated in the first moments of taking stock, let's say, which was probably happening just around, the boom and bust of, .com mania or how we called it, Tulipomania, back in, you know, '99 and and 2000. And this is also the moment, and I want to refer to this, when, one of our early, members of Nedime, presented her PhD thesis, at Goldsmiths in London. Her name is Corinna Patelis. She is from from Athens and she has wrote one of the first really thorough, you know, studies, and she called it, you know, plain, you know, political economy of the Internet. Right? She submitted it in 2000 and it's you can download it. And it really gives a very very good overview of that first decade. Of course, then after that, right, yeah, we, we we came in a completely different dynamic because first there was the, the first Internet crisis, which, coincided also with nine eleven and a couple of other things. Right? In 2000, 2001. But then in 2003, Silicon Valley really started to, restructure, itself. Venture capital really had a firm grip, at that, at that time. And this is when, web web two point zero was born and, you know, Facebook and Twitter and all the rest. Right? Although, Although I have to say, you know, that both Google and Amazon, of course, are companies from the first wave. Right? Right. So, Amazon started in '95, Google in '98, and, Google was the only one who's who, was able to grow and really benefit from the dot com crisis. This is very interesting. Right? And why? Why? Because, you know, they were fed by all this, venture capital that that kept on going. Right? And that didn't ask, you know, for, for revenues or, you know, let alone profit.

MoneyLab started as a network, exactly ten years ago, so, in, in late, 2013. And it had the first, conference event, in, in early fourteen, and it was opened, which is interesting, by Saskia Sassen, who, you know, is obviously Scott operates in. She's she's really, of course, you know, so much more, famous. And she she she, wrote her influential book on, on the role of global finance, in New York, London, and Tokyo, right, in the 1980s. And the way, global finance in these three, global cities, transformed, the city. Right? And our interview we started we started off, with, with that. Right? And so she, yeah. So I was very, proud that, you know, she would kind of kick kick off, the, the moneylapse initiative. Yeah at the time it was quite diverse. I was involved in the whole crypto scene very early on with Amir and, Jaramil and many others, that were in in Amsterdam that we met. And, yeah. So for us and for them, the whole, support of Julian Assange at the time in 2011 and 2012 really coincided with our growing interest in in the use of of of Bitcoin. And so, however, my Institute of Network Cultures that I started in 2004, before I had to had to deal with completely other, you know, urgencies. And and this is in 2011, of course, was also the year of Arab Spring, of, Occupy Wall Street and so many yeah. The movement of the squares, so many turbulence things. And we really wanted to address inside that the growing importance of social media monopolies and the work that already started, believe it or not, but the critique the critique of Facebook, Google, Instagram, you name it Twitter. Right? It was already very well, articulated back in 2011. We back then we had a complete and full awareness of, what was the situation and also what was ahead of ahead of us. So the the question of how to how to look at social media and social networking from a social media, from a social movements perspective was politically speaking more important than, the money lab, issue even though, you know, so we really had to, yeah, see how we were doing that. So this is why, there was a two year, delay. And so only in, '13, we, we started to focus on, and this is, of course, because, back then, yeah, the the the consequences of the of the global financial, crisis of two thousand eight became very apparent. Also in The Netherlands, we had a huge wave of, austerity which, hit our sick sector particularly hard. In The Netherlands in 2011 '12, the the the spending government spending on culture and the arts was literally overnight cut in half. Yeah. And so but this is what's happening of course across the board not not just in in culture was happening everywhere. And so so there was the the idea that people just had to focus much more on on self organization and on you know political protests in this field was quite high at the time. And and this is the real, let's say, origin of, of Money Lab. Originally, yeah, as you said in your introduction, the, the agenda was quite, broad. It we had an interest in crowdfunding. Because, yeah, because of the the the kind of the the decentralized nature of it. Very early on, we worked with Trevor Schultz and, you know, with the the focus, that he was developing, out of New York at the time on, platform cooperatives and these kinds of other models of what you could call, you know, nonprofit enterprises or give it give it a name. So, but Bitcoin was, yeah, was in fact, you know, one of the one of the six topics that, we discussed in Money Lab, one. Right? And so, and then, yeah, it developed. We organized three big events, in in Amsterdam in 1415 and '16 and then money lab started to travel. It again came back to Amsterdam in '19 And unfortunately, that was then also the last one, to have a physical meeting because after that, COVID, kicked in and Yeah. We organized four, moneylabs online which was you know a huge effort and very successful. But then late twenty one kind of we didn't really maybe we ran out of steam or people didn't want to, have yet another Zoom conference, you know. So that this was clearly visible in, and, yeah, now, we are here in, in Limassol, and this was, you know, the thirteenth, edition, of Money Lab. Quite quite small, and that's just because, you know, we, we lost a lot of, ground. We lost a lot of, resources in particularly. As you may have noticed, we did not lose, you know, our critical focus. And I think the the we can be, proud that the overall level, of, of the presentations and also of the Yeah. Debates, it was, it was, high. So in that sense, we can be proud and we can also be confident. However, in the last, two years, yeah, I don't know. Something has happened and it's maybe it's inevitably also connected to, a lot of people being very, disappointed about, you know, where where the whole crypto thing, was going.

become a bit sick of it. Yeah. And, in my, you know, recent book, Sad by Design and, Stuck on the Platform, I've, literally, brought, these two, elements, together. So but for me, the the mental state of of the online billions you know which is really quite diverse of course because it goes from from anger to despair to anxiety, to sadness, melancholy, but even up to, you know, the more clinical problems such as depression, right? So this whole, let's say scope of problems, I have dealt with extensively, but also pointed out always that, you know, forms of self organization and forms of awareness of more sustainable models, should be a way out. Here in Europe, we cannot, just, you know, withdraw on what I call, you know, European offline romanticism, which is a kind of a very German idea. And if you just over the weekend, you know, put your phone aside and go to the forest, etcetera. Yeah? That you you could somehow recover and recuperate. This is this is not the way to go. Yeah? So, for for us, the the social today is a is a techno social and, should be also a monetary, social. You know, should be a form of, of care in which, we think about production, finance, but also about redistribution of wealth, and a more, you know, democratic and distributed form of value creation. So, and and this is for me part of the solution. Right? Mhmm. But I didn't think Brett was suggesting, you know, that working on the solution would make you sick. I don't I don't think so. No. No. No. But,

Yeah. It's probably not driving it. But I would turn it around a little bit and I would say the defining thing for a sustainable struggle of social movements is autonomous infrastructure. And and one that really, you know, can, can continue, for for years or even decades because in that way you accumulate experience and, and maybe yes, you accumulate money and capital, but maybe not, you know, defined, just by how much euros there are on the bank because, you know, capital money and value as we know you know we can really also discuss alternative definitions of them, right? And this kind of also comes of course which is a very important source of inspiration from the feminist you know critique of the political economy back in the 1970s, right? In which they critiqued the invisible and of the immaterial labor of housework, right? And so, so and this is this is in itself, you know, a very important critique of the, let's say, classic or dogmatic Marxian political economy that was only focused on on the male and on the on the exploitation of the male worker in the factory. Right? Mhmm. No. We've moved on, from there, luckily. Right. We're fifty years later. Right? And, I I I think a lot of the ideas of, of of value and money now are based on very different notions.

Sure. No. I'm never tired of doing that. It's probably the most, you know, well known, of, of the the concepts, that we developed, which are never, just merely, ideas. Right? The idea of tactical media, goes back to the, yeah, to the mid nineties, I would say, when we had an really an idea or that you had you had an infrastructure with your own radios and magazines and, you know, Internet, websites and virtual communities and mailing lists and you name it. Right? But, that kind of solid infrastructure didn't say much about how you would utilize them or how you would combine them at in a moment of political struggle or campaigning or yeah. And so the the idea of tactical media then, comes from, an idea that, you know, in some cases, it can be very significant, politically speaking, if you wanna kick off a campaign to do, you know, graffiti graffiti in on the streets or or spread, you know, pamphlets or yeah? Or in in other cases, you know, you would, you would be active, you would start online. In in the next case you would, you know, emphasize on gatherings, you know, on coming together in real space. So the notion of tactical media is then one which emphasizes the flexibility of us and maybe also it's an invitation to maybe go beyond you know, what, we're traditionally, good at or focused at in in in this case. You know, for young people that would, of course, be in, you know, something like Instagram. Right? Everything, starts and finishes with, Instagram Instagram these days. Right? And so, yeah, a technical media notion would would just, you know, point at, you know, the sheer, endless possibilities that there are, beyond Instagram. Right.

Sure. And this And that's a tactical media question. And at the time I would say, you know, it was also a critique, of a very narrow, kind of focus of, on the left, just on traditional mainstream media. So you would be successful if you were, seen on television or, you know, if you you would have a radio coverage or, if, if a mainstream, daily newspaper would write about you. And we, you know, in the nineties already thought this is such an old fashioned, idea. Right? And it doesn't say anything, about, you know, the, the intervention that you did or or, you know your appeal on on the collective imagination. It's all you know if you go in that mainstream media direction you you inevitably only talk about representation, right? Who do you represent or were you, represented well, you know, by this or that radio station or in a in a TV show? Of course you were not. No, you were fucked over, Right? Because

That is really, you know, a very important shift that we have seen maybe also in the last ten years because, we have, you know, it was a very painful lesson, but we had to witness that the right wing populists Right. Were ahead of us in in this in this case. And and because they were maybe even more so aware that, you know, they would never have a a fair say, in the mainstream media. Right? And and these days, yeah, it's even strange because can I still, you know, use a term like mainstream media? We we've always done that. Right? I've I've worked in this field for for forty, almost fifty years now. And, nowadays, yeah, I feel a a certain shame, to to talk about mainstream media because, this term has been, you know, taken over and monopolized so much by, by right wing populists.

you know, Noam Chomsky reading the New York Times and so on, Paper Tiger Television. You know, there's, there's, numerous numerous, cases. So, yeah. So we need to be, in that sense, again, more confident, and maybe less, ashamed. Mhmm. And, we need to strike back, in in this term. You know, the the critique of the mainstream media, has been a project that, we've been, working on for fifty or so years. Mhmm. And, this culminated in in, in an acute awareness that, it's not enough, to critique them, to deconstruct their agendas, to, practice, you know, the ideology, criticism, but that this can only be done, if we also have, our own channels that, have to be sustainable and have to be maintained also financially.

of left media is basically Patreon right now. Yeah. And that is a problem. And then you enter, let's say, you know, the first ten years of, of the money lap, debate because, the next question then, would be, of course, there's Patreon. This is a platform. This is an intermediate. Yeah. And, the promise, of, of the crypto blockchain etcetera was and maybe still still is, you know, that it would do away with these platforms and intermediates, right? Yeah. Now the question then is, you know, what are, peer to peer payment systems? Can we also think not just only of direct payments, but also of redistribution of wealth, you know, not just on, in in a neoliberal sense like this subject pays another subject. Right. But putting it, you know, in a in a societal context, which, also for for the from the perspective of, culture and the arts is, is incredibly, important because it is never just solely, about the survival of,

And this, you know, can be done, and there's experience with that by, setting up, larger funds that redistribute, this money. Right? And so, I really hope that in in the next round of the the crypto blockchain debate, you know, we would just come also to, the the founding of of a number or a diversity even of, of initiatives, of, nonprofits, funds, that, you know, of course, you know, where would the money for the fund come from? Right? This is this is an important one, but equally important is, the question of, you know, how would you dem dem democratically like to, redistribution, redistribute this, this newly acquired wealth, which, in my understanding is always, you know, commonwealth in in essence. You know? It's an extraction, of the commons after all. Right? And so we need to, focus much more on, on the creation of these, redistribution

thing. Yeah. Of course. But, you know, usually with this kind of stuff, we need to just, you know, launch, the concept and then, discuss it with many, propose it in in in in many different, forums Mhmm. And places. And then for sure, because this is a dynamic field, you know, and then this is my experience over the last forty, fifty years that if you if you, you know, have an idea and if you put it out there in the world, and if you don't just let it go, and work on it and, and create something around it, there will definitely be an outcome. So, you know, this could really be an optimistic ending of this, of this podcast. So, you know, the it is really important to understand that, there are always beginnings, of critical speculative concepts, but that concepts have consequences and that, you know, that this, this talk is not just mere talk. If only we know that, you know, these days, talk, can and will be immediately translated into code. Yeah? And then, yeah, because this is how it, how it works. Talk has this inevitable machinic, you know, aspect, to it these days. And if we do that well, you know, our, concepts, critical concepts that, you know, want to create sustainable infrastructures, and support, social movements, can and will be successful.