Dancing with radical economics at the DisCO: A feminist cooperative alternative to DAOs
This week, after a a few delays, I was finally able to interview a couple of the masterminds behind DisCO (Distributed Cooperative Organization). I spoke to Stacco Troncoso (@StaccoP2P) and Natalia Avlona who are both members of the crew working on DisCO, also called DisCONAUTS. A DisCO is an alternative / critique / complement to DAOs (Decentralized Autonomous Organizations) that focuses more on P2P/commons, cooperatives, and feminist economics. During the interview we cover what som...
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So you guys listening to the Blockchain Socialist Podcast and for today's interview, I'm very excited. I'm with Staco Troncoso and Natalia Aflona. They are two members of, the group that is working on creating DISCOs, which stands for distributed cooperative organization. And it is a feminist cooperative and commons oriented alternative to the mainstream DAOs or decentralized autonomous organizations. So how are you both doing?
We're still alive in 2021, which is quite an achievement.
Still alive. Cold weather where I am. Hoping for 2022. Yeah. Thinking a lot about, like, the care work. Like, each of us, and,
as members of communities have been taking over for the past two COVID years. Yeah. And I I know you both have been, working quite a lot since it's been it's taken us a while to get us together in one, at one time because you guys have been asked to do so many different presentations and talks I could see. But, maybe just to to start off, could each of you give just a brief introduction to yourself and how you ended up in, how do you ended up at the disco?
We met at the Museum of Archaeology in Athens. We had, like, a good conversation in the in the prehistory of DISCO. DISCO comes from the actual practices of, cooperative, which I cofounded with my partner, Marie Utrechtel, in 2013 called Guerrilla Translation. And Guerrilla Translation arose of the practices of the fifteen m slash occupy, SLAPS, two thousand eleven movements, also present in Greece, which is where Natalia is from. And we wanted to take some of our activism to the workplace and mix in some of the innovations that we were seeing around peer to peer interactions, commas, etcetera, in something that was centered around our productive capacities, you know, what is popularly known as work, and kind of, putting activism where we feel it belongs, which is in the workplace, where you're going to spend a third of your of your life. So out of that, and I worked then with the p two p foundation. We, we implemented a lot of the stuff that was being theorized and obstructed in the foundation in real life. So we had first hand experience of what worked for us, what didn't work for us. And out of that, we always say that, discos didn't come from white paper, and they came from laughter, tears, or the panoply of feelings that you can have in life applied to activism in the workplace and applied to engaging with technology, engaging with feminisms, etcetera. And this goes what we do now. We've we've open sourced the protocol, and we're in this in this process of getting feedback on how people are adopting it, etcetera.
That's great. Yes. It was, we met in the Archaeology Museum. And if I remember well, it was 2015, but maybe it was 2016. So I I joined this call, as a member and as a participant and as an observer, one and a half year ago. But we knew each other for, long time because, I was also around commons and activist movements in Greece, the previous years, like, let's say, the the gate of the recession. So I was mostly active on digital commons and, feminist perspective, feminist ethics, and techno feminism around digital commons because, we wanted very much to, tackle all this techy, Eurocentric, masculine approach to hackerspaces in Greece and in general at that point of time. And I was also a member of, Cooperative in Athens and which was part of the greater social solidarity movement that the last years in Greece and in Europe was, emerging and was, having more discussions with the common space peer production and then commons movements. So it goes, quite optimistic point of time for us, whilst in recession. So right now, I'm based in Copenhagen. I am PhD researcher in the computer science department whilst my background has been in law. And I'm looking at, the ways that value is ascribed into data and data driven design. And, I'm very, very much looking into alternative forms of, data, approach and perspective. So looking more towards, like, what should be and what could be a relational approach to to data in terms of the legal foundation of, data protection and data governance. And we have having we have been having an ongoing discussion with, DISCO for, like, two years now about, what would care ethics mean and, how care ethics can go beyond, like, the ethics discussion into more applied framework in terms of work. And what do we actually mean by work, in a post capitalist initiative. And, this discussion has been also transformed into the realm of DAOs. That's Taco. We'll talk more about it. And I'm looking more, into the ways that, care ethics can be, applied into the way we concede, like, data and their legal foundation and the ways that care ethics can also be applied into the design of the data driven economy.
Sure. Well, maybe I think it could be really helpful for some people if you could explain a bit some of these concepts that you were talking about as a because I think that'll be a form of good foundation for how we understand, like, why Discos are well, why we wanted to you guys wanted to create Disco, as a framework, as an alternative. So, like, I heard you say things like, care ethics. There's care work, feminist economics. These are all things that are maybe, not, yeah, not not yet quite mainstream concepts for people. So sometimes, when they hear it, they may not know what that means. So maybe we could explain a bit what are some of these, like, fundamental concepts, to thinking about discos.
I will start just with talking a bit about, my, most inspirational and foundational feminist theory, Federici, and then I will give the floor to, to Staco. Okay. So, I mean, for us, care ethics is something that it's much more complicated than feminism, whilst feminism is a complicated thing. And we don't really want to approach, like, the diversity in a sense of add more women and stir, if this has to do with blockchain, if this has to do with cooperatives, if this has to do with common space production. So it goes, it goes deeper, and it goes deeper into the discussion of Marxist feminists and particularly Federici who has been, like, very, very militant and has done a lot of work to explain that commons cannot really exist without feminisms. And, like, she she really centered, like, the discussion on the commons, like, back, back into the seventies, Sylvia Federici, into the sphere of reproduction. So, for for Marxist feminist and the feminist the seventies, like, the sphere of reproduction, the private the private sphere was, what we should aim for, like, restructuring, because it includes all the affected work, the domestic work, all the work that, like, women have been doing for their children, for the elderly, for the sick, even, like, for the neighborhood or the community. And this work has been highly invisible and undervalued. And whilst it's the most essential, work for our, survival and for our social reproduction. And this became, like, really, really obvious, during the last two, years of the pandemic. So they the the the discussions, like, the the feminist discussion from the seventies really came up into the forefront and solved their importance, like, within the COVID, crisis. So, her argument is that, like, the commons can be a structural alternative to capitalism only if we are able to to revise them these two spheres, like and the way we conceive the the the public sphere where the which is the sphere of, like, the work and the private sphere, which is the sphere of, social reproduction and where work is taking place there and is not visible or is not considered as work. So this means, like, we need to really rearrange and reevaluate the way we consider work and the way we define care work into the community and the commons. So, like, where does, like, the work of the commons? Where does the work of the co communities belong? Does it belong into the public sphere? Does it belong into the private sphere? So for for for Federici and for us, the whole idea is that we need to rename and to restructure that the the way we we vision work within these two spheres and to go beyond this. So I just now want to give the floor to, Staco after this small historical introduction.
I don't have much to add. I think that you you've explained it perfectly. What I said is that these concepts are not mainstream as concepts, but as reality science practices, they're totally mainstream because, I don't know, we tend to talk about network topologies. Yeah? So you are the blockchain socialist. So how does socialism, work in a blockchain? Well, it has to do with value accounting. It has to do with value sovereignty and the recording of those new values. If those new values are not, incorporating feminist theory, they're really missing out in some of the most exciting innovations of Marxism in the last century and a half, I would say. And one of the foundational texts of feminist economics is Marilyn Waring's What if Women Counted? So What if Women Counted? What things will we make visible as concepts that would lead to, like, the the design of new new economies? So, you know, in DISCO I mean, DISCO is an alternative to DAOs, but it's not just an alternative to DAOs because that would kind of, like, put DAOs in the privileged position of being whole universes on their own, you know, and of disco just being a a derivative of that.
I want to ask, could we see it as well, as, I guess, maybe complimentary, like a like a complimentary critique, I guess, a bit. I I have because I've just because, I mean, a few DAOs that I've seen have been really interested in disco as well from from
my research. It can be I mean, in our opinion, it can be a precondition for the design of DAOs, and also to take into account, like, the the topologies of decentralization are never just based on how nodes interact with each other and just basically computer based topologies. There are bodies, beyond those computers that have effective intellectual and other kinds of needs. And DISCO I mean, we can get into, like, some of the the differences between DAOs and DISCOs. But the the import the important thing is that DISCO is much more than an alternative to DAOs because it's, it's a melting pot, to use the the Gibson Graham term, of alternative economies. So DISCO interfaces with and attracts with, you know, publics, people from DAOs. It attracts people from their social and solidarity economy, from from cooperatives, people coming more from the commons and peer to peer and offers a lexicon where we can have, like, a fruitful dialogue of you know, be realistic about the prospects of technology and be very critical about how we design our technologies, which may be with the best intentions, but may, wittily reproduce some of the stuff that has been criticized. Yes. From feminist economics, from twentieth and twenty first century Marxism, etcetera. It's important to to give a space to these to these critiques.
And, yeah. When I was just thinking when you were saying that, like, what yeah. Socialism on the blockchain, if if that if that is a thing, if that could ever exist in our in our wildest dreams, then it would obviously have to think about very, very hard what types of value we are accounting for. And it would very obviously have to move beyond just, I guess, our sort of monoculture of financial value that we have under under capitalism. So, I think that was a very interesting point. But, yeah, maybe we can start to talk about what exactly is a disco. We're not talking about, of course, like, the place where we go dancing, although maybe, there are some similarities.
Yeah. I mean, not to overextend the metaphor. It's a place where you where you mix together and where you get to express yourself in nonlinear ways. It depends on how how funky your your dancing is. But, I mean, discodisco.coop is a set of it's basically seven principles to reimagine economies. And they're constraints. I mean, they're constraints on your creativity, on how to reimagine economies, but they're very creative. And for us, it's a process. So, you know, again, whether you're a co op, whether you're thinking of, like, starting a DAO, you can question with your group. There are these seven disco principles, and these are like challenges. And we don't have the answers. I mean, we have the answers that in our own economic experimentation we came up with, but we want other people to to offer answers. We're in a very critical decade. I think that it's the end of the world as we know it, and not of all of us feel fine. And out of this desperation, you see you see various reactions. I mean, you you see fascism, which is like the which is the not new reaction of blaming the other for the social ills, and that kind of, like, invisibilizes the responsibilities of capitalism in perpetuating inequalities, environmental destruction. You see a really strong tendency now in conspiracy theorizing, which makes, abstract other, throws out science and throws out, like, a lot of, of the research in political economy that has been offered, and, again, invisibilizes capitalism. So we want to offer, like, a proud anti capitalist alternative that is not coy. It's not social entrepreneurship. It's not coy about, like, being, like, it's fine. We have an economic system. It's called capitalism. It does not mean markets. It means you know, it's basically three things, private ownership of the means of production, wage labor, and orientation towards profit. But lo and behold, there's this thing called cooperatives where there's no I mean, there's cooperative ownership of the means of production. There's no wage labels. There are worker owners, and the orientation is towards the coop, not towards the accumulation of profit. So how can we make this orientation, be expanded towards the the challenges that we tackle nowadays? So this call gives you the initial provocations for you to, with your group. I mean, we always say it takes two to tango, but it takes three and four to this call, to answer these provocations and then apply them in your own specificity. And then we would ask you, document it, talk to us, talk with us, sorry, and then we will develop the tools to make, to make this course happen.
Stacco has said pretty much everything. I just wanted to to raise, like, a more kind of abstract point on what you said about the the value and how value is perceived nowadays in DAOs and blockchain. And there are so many assumptions, in the way we have been using and describing the idea of value into, the circulation of data and the extraction of data. And we we tend to forget that, like, the ways that, like, economic value, the contemporary economic value is linked with other values, like moral values. And economic value is reflecting moral values of the society, each time, and, each era. And at the same time, like, we we we we we tend to forget like that. We try to replace, like, politics with business as, Nathan Smith Nathan Smithner said into a very interesting article, like, really recently. And this is the the case of blockchain. So we tend to make assumptions on the neutrality and objectivity of the value that data behold, and we don't really question how this value is, constructed and how this value is extracted. Because data are not a thing and data do not exist out there. Data are extracted, so through, kind of different mediums and data analytics, and they are classified by the interest of the big tech. So, there are a series of assumptions out there, and it's interesting for us to talk about them. And it's interesting to find ways to to tackle them, because if we don't really understand that, like, what is extracted is actually the essence of, like, the people's interaction, the interaction we have between us, then we can't really find a way to figure out what, different way to understand value and what a different way to produce value would be. And, this call is exploring, like, an alternative governance model, which also addressing some of the problems and the lacks that we had in digital commons and common based payer production. Common based payer production was an alternative model of, producing value, but it never really had a governance model, and that was a problem. And there was never, the there was never the provision of, what does it happen with the people's contribution because we have been heavily relying on, you know, the voluntary, contribution of, all of us or the people who have been contributing, for example, in Wikipedia, like in the. But if we want to make this like, if we want to to talk about scalability or if we want to talk about expansion, then we have to really figure out, like, the the the survival, the the social reproduction of these people who have been contributing into these initiatives, into digital commerce, into common space per production. So this code does this, and it's kind of, like, offering, like, a more holistic, and alternative governance model for this. And this government model is tackling this idea that, like, we do things for living and we do things for, our, social reproduction. And the second things we do are not visible. And within the second sphere, we also do our voluntary activist work. So what it does, it actually tries to say that, no. Like, we need to find a third section, a third way to be able to bring visibility to the activist work, but not to monetize it in a way that is, like, is perceiving value in the current way. We need to find different ways to value the work, that is done in, in in our activist lives.
Yeah. I mean, that's you're absolutely right. And that's also like a privilege with engagement engaging whether it's with or with common space peer production is do you have the time? Do you have the cognitive bandwidth to engage with this as opposed to, you know, being able to to make a living? So, again, if we want to if we want to prototype new economic systems, we don't want we don't want this to be led by a hacker class, to use the McKinsey Ward, term. We want it to be led by all the stakeholder I mean, all the all the people and also, governing inputs as we come from the nonhuman world into those new economics designs. With, com commerce based commerce based peer production, you know, this is kind of like the proto mode of production that we find in something like the VLC media player, open source projects like, you know, Linux, Apache, WebServer, or indeed Wikipedia. And there's there's there's this persistent assumption that commons and commons based payer production are the same thing, and they're not. Commons based payer production are usually synonymous, large scale, over the Internet artifacts, which thrive on permissionless, much like, public blockchains or many DAOs. It's like, you know, you just need, like, access and to follow the preset governance to contribute. So this is like many to many contributions. Commons are more intimate affairs, and at least according to Ostrom, they have very clear boundaries. So boundaries versus permissionless, there's very different relationalities where most of your interactions are taking place through the abstraction of algorithms on the machine or when your interactions are actually human based. And then after that learning process, you interact with the algorithms, but you don't interact as a as a lonely agent. Yeah? So that's so that's another of the distinguishing factors that I I would say are quite important to note.
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Yeah. It it's a little bit like when they ask us what is the difference between, like, a cooperative and a disco as well. Like, a cooperative is a legal structure. It doesn't tell you what it does. Apparently, there's a cooperative in Scotland that designs missile guidance systems. She always a co op, the workers are very well treated, but, you know, where they're put in their productive capacity is not the best thing the same thing the best thing. Sorry. A DAO is an algorithmic structure instead of a legal structure, which is scurries to find legal structures to uphold it, but it doesn't tell you what the DAO does. And, yes, circa, I don't know, I would say, like, 2014, 2016, and then the collapse of the DAO with the article and the disillusionment goes to show you cannot sanitize human messiness. And, in fact, human messiness messiness may be a fertile ground for for doing things. So, I mean, just to go over some of the focusing on the disco versus DAO, contrast. And, again, with the caveat that disco is not just an alternative to DAOs. It's the it's it's a lot more because DAOs are not the the end of the world. Again, what are the politics? What are the values reproduced in DAOs? Well, here's, here are some values that we propose to you. Discourse are relational. DAOs are transactional. In DISCOs, they're based on trust. DAOs do away with trust by putting it in the, in the algorithm. In this course, the the economic information of the value streams that we have is used for visualization and to have richer conversations on how to do economic experiments. In DAOs, you know, the self executing contracts is there's this again, this is a caricature, but we do see this happening is if we get the math right, then the smart contract will auto execute rewards and punishments. And, you know, there's no human discussion on, like, how can we make this how can we make this better? I think that those are also, like, very self referential. They tend to, like, prime the, again, the idealism of the algorithm rather than the base reality and the value creation. Value creation to do what? Who's going to do the actual get their hands dirty to do the work with the capital that is raised by by DAOs? And that that that's something that gets left out of the conversation. So this goes to our our way to design better DAOs and to offer a critical way to engage with value sovereignty that goes away from technocracy. And technocracy is what we find in mainstream economics. For example, like, after the two thousand and eight crisis where in Europe, at least, the European Central Bank was, you know, hand appointing, presidents, you know, and the Mario Montes, etcetera, and they were technocrats. Why? Because laypeople or the lumpy proletariat, they're not smart enough to understand economics. And we're not smart enough to understand economics because modern economics are totally abstracted, predicated on creating fictitious value. How far away is that from some of the use cases that we've seen in the DAO space? How much is it part of our technocracy, and who's the new DAOist class that is designing these systems in the name of decentralization? Would say again, like, decentralizing what are we decentralizing the technologies of oppression, which is capitalism, the patriarchy and colonialism, or are we only decentralizing topology based on token access? And, again, I'm I'm I'm painting like a caricature, but I think that it's it's important to contrast these things because, again, with the optimistic visions of DAOs, we can go back to 1996 on the Internet, you know, like at the beginning of a film. What could possibly go wrong? Well, a lot went wrong when economic interests, went in. And with Gauss in particular, I feel that if they become mainstream or they become, you know, a tool for oppressive governments and regimes to algorithmically enforce things away from what is, traditionally established jurisdiction, we can get into, like, some very serious, very serious trouble. And, again, once the money comes in, once the power comes in, we have to just say, like, okay. This is a DAO. This is a And also this is an algorithmic structure, but this DAO is mediated in those four principles and discussed at the human level before we go into the the design level.
Sorry. I'm in the kitchen, in my flat, and, like, my flatmate just, dropped in. Okay. So I was trying to say that, actually, I was in a discussion very recently, and I heard, like, the statement that, DAOs enables decentralized communities to compete with the big tech. So as Taco said, we have the same story with, like, the the Internet, like, 1996 and, like, you know, we have, like, we have put all this hope and optimism into decentralization. And, it proved out that it it was, like, very problematic, and we didn't really like, this way also is problematic. So people didn't really count on, like, the interest of the big tech. And I'm feeling that something similar is going to happen because right now there is, this, narrative that only the small startups or the medium, like, enterprises are, using, DAOs, and this is, like, very, very emancipated for them. And but we we obviously, like, big tech is going to get into the game very soon, and it will it will kind of, like, enclose, like, notes of, like, this decentralized, mechanism. And another point that I wanted to raise, like, this the the context. It's the context of DAOs. Like, we can't really talk about DAOs as a universal, like, automated mechanism that we can apply it anywhere, and it will automate everything with, like, you know, strong objectivity. This is not the case. Like, this is not the case at all. Like, situations are highly contextual. We have to take this in into consideration. And, also, I mean, humans are mess and humans, have flaws. So this idea that we can through, like, these smart contracts, we can actually bypass, like, the human flows into something that is better and, like, more objective. What does this even mean? And, like, one example is, like, if you want to replace, like, with if you want to replace in a bank the way that the loans are given to people and you replace their the person who is responsible to give the loan to, a citizen, then what do you do by this? Like, does the person feel that, like, the the result on what he's been given? Like, if he's given the loan or no, it's something that is, objectively decided, whereas he would think that if a human being has done this, then maybe there are bias. So I don't know. This is like a broader example that goes beyond, like, cooperatives just to show that, like, this idea of, replacing, like, humans with, like, algorithms that would lead us into better and more objective ways of governance is, like, highly problematic.
I I just had a thought when you were when you were giving out some of the some of the examples, Natalia, which again has to do with measuring, how we measure and how we make decisions on our measurements of the world. So in a DAOist, and by this, I mean, Lao Zed, DAOist, not decentralized autonomous organization sense, I would say that a lot of the the technocratic solutions, they're map, but they're not territory. And I think that this go, in a more intuitive sense, deals more with the realities of the effective dimension, of the of the dimension that wants to escape from from counting. And we do need to count. We need to strike this, kind of, like, balance between magic and science so we can have better conversations about the way we count and about the the way that we create value, but stay in territory, not just default to maps which are, you know, cryptographically validated to the quark level. You know, we could make a simulation of reality, and I'm sure that someone's thinking about this. There's no simulation which is, you know, validated by cryptographic contracts that just go, you know, like turtles all the way down, that go into the smallest components. And, you know, look out the window and check out the richness of life and, you know, this decaying world that we're living in, what do you take inspiration from? What are the kinds of things that feel right? And then I think that we can have more informal informed and mature discussions about how we measure and about how we and about how we create, like, new institutions because this is another this is another danger is, okay. If we are coming from socialism and we want to go to, like, upper stage communism, when does the withering of the state and the monetary system and class happen? When does the withering away of doubts happen? Or how you know, if we if if we do want to go, you know, to our society from each according to the capacity, to each according to their need, when do we let go of the crutches? And a DAO could be a crutch towards that society and start walking. And, again, I feel that a lot of the the solutions proposed can be self reinforcing and obfuscating some of the larger questions.
Yeah. I I think those are really, interesting points. I think sometimes, when it comes to DAOs, or when it comes to the the problem is when I talk about it, like, I'm thinking of, like, four different definitions that I've heard it be described and, like, depending on how wide or narrow you want to define it, it could be, like, very confusing. It's like some people will say, okay, this, very large DeFi protocol for for some or, you know, decentralized exchange is a DAO because they have a token in which you can vote on governance. And I think those are the people who you have the people who, like, really want everything to be DAOs. They really are, like, DAO hype men. They want to say, no. It exists and it's it's, like it's working. But then there are other people who say like, no, no, no. This is just like, token like allocated governance in which it is very, very flawed. There are a lot of issues because if venture capital owns like half of your tokens and they're they just vote everything the way that they want to then it doesn't, you know, it doesn't it's not really truly decentralized. So I think a lot of it comes out of like the the the term decentralized decentralized or decentralization as being just an incredibly incredibly vague term that in my opinion at least, I don't know if you agree, like I feel like it doesn't mean anything unless it is like couched in a lot of context. So I think a lot of people, they sort of, especially in the blockchain space, they talk about decentralization as being like an objectively good thing and something that needs to happen. But it's is largely used as a way to sort of almost like, project or, like, give a veneer of democratization or that I think that's what a lot of people want to they want it to mean democratization when you say decentralization, but that isn't always the case, especially when it comes to decentralized technology. Sometimes you just mean that in a, you know, we just have now we have a 100 computers holding up the network as they have just one. But anyways that was a long rant. But, yeah, I guess, where am I? Yeah. I guess, if you could I guess we talked about what DAOs are missing. Could you talk a bit about maybe, like, the, cooperative principles within a disco? Because I think, what has been really interesting, at least for me in the DAO space, is that a lot of people who are interested in DAOs have become very, very interested in cooperatives, which is nice, I guess. But at the same time, I think there is a little bit of a misunderstanding of what a cooperative is. Like, I think some people just believe that a DAO is automatically a cooperative, but I I'm sure you guys would agree that's not exactly the case.
I sympathize with the feeling because I think that, if the DAO space is going through adolescence or maybe post adult, post pubescence, where the where the excitement of the possibilities has been shut down, of course, cooperatives have a hundred and seventy five year old tradition of already existing economic distribution. But if you look at the humans, it's very different. There's 2,500,000 cooperative societies with over 1,000,000,000 members, and that membership of the cooperative space is a lot less homogeneous than those engaging with the blockchains and DAOs. Cooperatives are spaces of mutual of economic neutrality and vulnerability, and they often, you know, they're often, like, constructed in a context of precarity and of scarcity. And, again, I don't wanna make, like, a caricature of blockchain bros, but there is a profile. And, you know, 96% of the Ethereum community, which is not the same as the DAO community, is men. And I think that it was, like, 80% is, like, it's it's white folks. So, you know, we're talking about decentralizing, etcetera. But are we talking about decentralizing power? And are we talking about offering access to people who may not think or sound like you. And over there, cooperatives, you know, have, have a much better weather track record, record. Also, cooperatives, to me, are a market formalization of the spirit of the commons of commoning. But cooperatives have lost sight of the commons a little bit, and that's also one of the missions of DISCO. I mean, you know, we're not perfect by by any means, but, you know, we wanted to take DAOs to task based on our observations and to take cooperatives to task. But it's like when you have a cousin that you feel like, hey. Let me just share some feelings with you, give you some provocations so we can do many exciting things because co ops are relevant. And co ops are exciting, and those are exciting. But it's not it's not a match made in heaven because they're very mismatched. And, again, algorithmic structures are very different from from legal structures. So we feel that this call can be can be a space of dialogue, but also a space of inclusion for those who may not resonate with DAO stock properties but do resonate with, you know, like, like I say, it's the end of the world as we know it. What do we do? Hey. How about instead of, like, working for the man or giving your time away to a bullshit job, we do things that matter with entrusted spaces of economic experimentation. I've been reading the, rest in peace, the the latest book by David Kraemer and David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything, which talks, you know, like, anthropologically and archaeologically, how Homo sapiens squared have always had economic experimentation. So why did we get stuck in hierarchical systems? And I don't think that economic experimentation needs to be large scale. I think it needs to be practiced at the small scale and then figure out how we federate, but with those firsthand experiences, which are not just coached on comparative principles and practices, but on the commons and feminist economics and all these notions of invisible value, which which frankly, like, cannot be left out of the conversation any longer, especially if you're espousing, you know, the linguistics of being radical and reimagining value and economics. There's an economic tradition. You know, there's psychological economics. There is feminist economics. And, you know, we need to engage with those, and it will just make for for much better systems, I I feel. And it feels that it's the high time that,
as, Stacos said, like, DAOs and cooperatives join forces, and it's not a match made in heaven. But it's been like this this discussion has been cultivated for many years now, the last decade at least of this discussion about, like, the the the commons communities as Ostrom described them and the governance model they had and then, like, the scalability of the digital commons and then the whole tradition of cooperatives and how are we going to find a way to bring all these alternative governance models together. And, as I said before and as, these are as discourse story as Taco, clarified, there has been some gaps in the common space per production and the way we understand commoning. Because what Ostrom was referring to, how to do a lot with physical resources and physical communities. And digital commas had like, they they scaled up into the infinity because of, like, you know, the the the global, like, online communities. But still, like, we we haven't figured out a a a governance model that would give people, like, access to their means of the production. So access to owning, like, their platform and to be able to do commoning commoning. So there has been, like, this discussion for quite a few years now, and I think it's high time to talk about it. And it's high time to talk about it because also, like, all these feminist voices in commons, feminist voices in hackerspaces, in digital commons, they need to to to join, like, the discussion equally. And, actually, like, in a very foundational way, not just stakeholders into the holders into the discussion. Because, like, if you do all these things from a feminist perspective, then you have to undo and redo.
Yeah. That that's, is is very well said. One of the things that comes up in my mind as well about a criticism that I've heard before, especially around, cooperatives is that sometimes you have people who are also on the left who are very, very, let's say, doubtful of cooperatives as being a viable alternative to, yeah, I guess, the the current situation that we're in as, like, a vehicle for, like, any type of change. You know, for example, Evgeny Morozov had that the one, tweet that became somewhat, somewhat famous, and I think he doesn't like me. But, he's, you know, these type of people who tend to be very, very critical of of cooperatives and tend to, think that, you know, what what you're talking about they may agree with, but that the only way to achieve that is via really, like, ultimately, what I think they're getting at is just a stronger state or a state that is more willing to stand up against capital. So I'm wondering if you guys have any thoughts about that.
I mean, all power to the Soviets. Right? And what happened after, you know, 1925, 1926. So, again, I mean, cooperatives, to me, are a system for topologies of, like, really decentralized and distributed economics. The left is the vanguardist, I would say, critic of of capitalism of cooperatives is nothing new. I mean, I'm going back to Marx. Marx called them, like, dwarfist forms. Engels was more chargeable to co ops. But, again, to me, that's kind of like an armchair critic, kind of thing. Oh, cooperatives haven't succeeded. Well, neither did, you know, Marxist Leninism in the face of, of a cold war. You understand? There is always, like, historical there's always historical factors. Cooperatives do not have the economic incentives and help from the state that a a company that is extracting oil from the Earth does. We don't have the same tax breaks as corporations where, you know, we're very much bullied, and we're allowed to exist under this veneer of like, oh, cooperatives are like this traditional thing. No. They're very radical. I mean, just just the fact of, like, taking worker ownership over the means of production and that being the point of socialism, hey. You're doing it with cooperatives. And to me, cooperatives are like even though functioning within a capitalist economy, they're essentially anti anti capitalist. And to, you know, Eugene's, infamous tweet is, again, like, history is written by the winners. So if we're criticizing cooperatives from the value metrics of the winners, yeah, of course, they have failed. But, there's 1,000,000,000 members. There's, turnover of, like, 3,000,000,000,000 US dollars, etcetera. So, you know, there could be an economic counter power. What is lacking from comparatives? What is lacking from comparatives is a political consciousness of, like, how exciting or revolutionary they can be, and then there's the state intervention. But to me, the state intervention has to be by delegating, powers. I mean, not to just like, okay. Let's make this, facilities public, take them away from private hands. It's not no. Let's practice radical economic subsidiarity, and let's give them over to cooperatives. And not just to, like, any old cooperatives, but to cooperatives that uphold, for example, we would offer these seven disco values, which incorporate all the feminist stuff, all the value tracking, you know, the multi stakeholder governance, and all the and all the other stuff. This to me is a much more interesting Green New Deal than giving it away to, like, corporations or just substituting, you know, the capitalism we know for a new updated version of state capitalism to face the climate emergency because it's not gonna work.
It's a very classical discussion. And, whether, like, cooperatives are prefigurative politics that they are just imaginaries for the future and, like, a bit utopic for the present. And so they kind of, like, act on a very symbolic, level and not, being viable, sustainable for the present. And there has been, like, a lot of leftist critique on cooperatives, but at the same time, there there there has been a part of of the left that has been, supporting cooperatives. And in, particularly the last decade, we've seen the, emergence like them of the discussion around social solidarity economy. And that emergent happened due to the recession in the big countries. So, what Staco said is, like, obviously, the I mean, it's a very strange discussion, and it comes up all the time. And a question is, like, do cooperatives belong into the third sector? Like because this is I mean, for me, this is, like, the the the big question. So what's the relationship of cooperatives, like, to the state and to the market? And do they want to, like, do partnership with the state so to ask, like, more support from the state in order to convert the market? Or they are in this third, like, place, sector of the pie that is called, like, third sector and is more like social enterprises. So, I mean, I don't know. Staco covered everything. It's just if there hasn't been, like, all this pressure of all these initiatives all these years, like, they there haven't been, there would haven't been any change into the EU policy. So if we have to talk, like, also about, like, EU, because we are based in EU, then there wouldn't have been this pressure, and then some of the policies wouldn't have been, a bit more friendly to this initiative. So we we can't really think when the the big revolution will happen and when we'll take cover, you know, the states and the market. Like, we have to figure out our ways to, to build initiatives and at the same time to be able to, to ask, like, support, like, to ask support, like, from the state, if it's needed. Because if the state was supporting cooperatives, as Tacko said, then things would have been much more different in terms, like, of taxation, of, outsource washing, like, all these things. So
Yeah. I sometimes feel like the a lot of those things are sort of discounted when when talking about cooperatives as if, like, I don't know, as if it was ever a fair match, you know, venture capitalist, funded startup versus a cooperative. It's there's there's clearly, like, one has has an advantage over the other in the current system. So you can't really, like, compare them apples for apples.
Yeah. And obviously, in a system that is kind of like, giving priority into any structure that, goes for profit. Like, obviously, like, cooperatives would start, like, from a very disadvantage place because, like, cooperatives give, give advantage and give, importance to, like, the the workers having their means of production. So, like, profit is redistributed within the cooperative. So it's not something that, is the aim of and the end goal of this structure. So, obviously, like, it wouldn't be able to, survive as easily as, a big corporation or even, you know, a very ambitious startup that aims for profit.
Yeah. I I feel like a lot of these I don't know. I guess, I don't want to be too mean but like nihilistic a bit left wing critiques of like any specific thing. It's you could always substitute with, oh cooperatives didn't do anything, oh unions didn't do anything, oh x didn't do anything because like, it's never going to be one thing that that ever solves a problem, right? It's always going to be, you know, various different strains of political movements that come together that then, like, you know, have a have a larger force to make something. So it's, like, cooperatives with a very clear political message with the help of unions, with the help of maybe politicians as well. Like, of course, that's that's what everyone would want. And so I think I find it sometimes silly to sort of denigrate one particular, subsection of that, as, I don't know, as a valid critique.
I was thinking when when Natalia talked about, like, our cooperatives, the third sector, both cooperatives and activism always get pushed into the place of the bronze medalist. So it's the third sector, you know, there's two which are more important. There's nonprofit, non government. Unlike the commons, it's like, it occupies this, kind of, like, shady position of nonrelevance, but they are relevant, and there's a lot of people working in co ops. I mean, this is you know, the state is another theater of struggle. Labour unions and and, in fact, in The UK, there's cooperative labour unions are a very important another lever. We don't know what's going to work, but I can tell you, the more people that we have engaged with critical economics, with critical tech design, that know how to do the hard stuff, which is relating to each other as human beings before interacting with algorithms, the better that we will be prepared. The capitalist state is not interested in giving, like, a pedagogy of you know, which is non patriarchal and decolonial or indeed, like, critical of capitalism. How can we reimagine science? How can we reimagine work and production? So, you know, it's I I feel that it's our duty to these school people, but that usually has been the province of activism. And, again, activism depends on if you have the time to practice activism, if you have that privilege, the same as engaging in DAOs. Most people have to work to pay the rent. So how can we reach, like, a compromise where you're actually doing a job and getting paid? And this is the this is another thing. We feel that this goes, it's, like, a much more working class kind of structure, where DAOs would be more like a technological class, kind of structure. If we have more people working on the things that matter, we will be much better prepared for rapid collapses and rapid shifts. Again, we would like to see a withering away of the state, a withering away of money. If we're already practicing, like, those relationships, we can look at what the commodifying certain areas of the economy look like. And to to me, like, discos in a sense, I mean, in the more in the more political sense, are like, temporary autonomous zones temporary autonomous zones of economic resistance that do have a foothold on the market through the cooperative through the cooperative structure while we're trying out things with new ledgers, while we're trying out new ways of accounting, but also relating to to each other. And what does, like, the big disco future look like? To us, it's like more and more discos, and we figure it out together. And, you know, and there's there's scope to talk about modularity and having, like, a shared lexicon, but also for widely different interpretations of what discos are within those seven values, which are very political, according to your own specificity, according to your own circumstance. And from there, draw inspiration. You know, does the recalling right thing, like, you know, how to be an anti capitalist in the twenty first century? So, you know, like, you kinda wrote capitalism. You can retreat and go to the country. You can do, political try to do political change, or you can go for the for the revolution. And this course kinda, like, combined, like, all four of those is, you don't have to be set on one anti capitalist strategy. You can be in this flexible place. And according to the political climate of the time, you can put your weight, beneath, you know, what may what may happen. I think that we're due for, like, a mass protest movement, much like Occupy, but, you know, with the learnings of Me Too, Black Lives Black Lives Matter, etcetera, because things are not going well and things are still not going to go well. And it would be exciting if that movement was not only working to break the glass ceiling of politics, but also to be working in distributed economics already and, you know, to be working like, hey. We have people. What is the demand of the future? Well, the demand of the future is not going to be to exacerbate absentee shareholder value. The demand of the future is, sorry to be so blunt, is the fucking survival of the human species and the biosphere that sustains us. So if we have already people doing that kind of work, hey. At least we're doing we're creating capacity for whatever changes, may happen. It's like you say, we don't know what's going to happen. So, again, being an amateur critic of the lack of success of cooperatives is like, well, are you a tenured professor that can make these critiques very much of hand, or are you part of the working class that you're supposedly advocating for?
Very well said. Maybe very quickly as well, I think it would be really interesting to hear from you guys, because I know I believe both of you are working for, as well with the Guerrilla Media Collective.
No. No. Stacco does. I am. Okay.
I mean, I I guess it it would be interesting, I think, just to, like, give give a give an image of some but to to to listeners, what it would be like Hello, listeners. What what it would look like if they were a part of a disco? What would maybe, like, their day look like? And maybe you can speak from some experience.
Sure. I I can speak about Guerrilla and, Natalia, if you want to chime in. Natalia has been on a bunch of collectives, which are disco like, also. In Guerrilla, the I mean, we went through a lot of economic experimentation that we were baffled with and was hard, but the level of solidarity and the level of familiarity with concepts which may be alien to people, has been really great. And in Garela, it was basically like a place for activist freelance translators who were doing activism, you know, post 15 m occupy and having their day jobs as translators. And increasingly, we became able to derive more more of our livelihood from the work that was being that was being done in Gorilla. And using the value flows is, you know, we created a commons. We created a commons of pro bono translations, stuff that would not have been translated otherwise because no one would pay for it. You can find that in the gorilla translation web pages in Spanish and in English. There's a lot of articles, which funnily enough, also, they're like a chronicle of the political maturation of disco. Because when you translate something, you really it's it's not just reading. It's like hyperintimate reading. Yeah? There's there's like a tactile, wanting to commune with the language. So a lot of those idea the ideas that we were translating ended up in disco. And Guerrilla was very successful. We we always had, like, more trouble with the economics and, like, incorporating the co work than with, like, getting gigs. Guerrilla would get gigs straight away because there was something that appealed to people. And I think it it's weird. We're talking about it recently. It's like, we seem to be, like, really good at branding while being, like, totally anti capitalist, but it's not branding. It's stimulating wants and desires. And capitalism is really good at stimulating wants and desires for shit that you don't need. But now I think that there's this this huge anguish and, like, worldwide trauma in the midst of this pandemic that never ends, that things have to change. And I think that disco, just as Guerrilla did, has struck a chord with people. That, you know, there's a process of unfolding, understanding, but also finding out what it means to you. But, aesthetically, it already feels fresh. It already feels like rebellious and punk like, which is good because it's what I I don't know. It's like a reflection of our personalities, you know, the folks in Guerrilla and those of us that that that that took disco. Day to day, you talk a lot, and you're and you talk about, like, how you feel, not just what you're doing. And you talk about your values, and you become political because being political is fun. It's like, you know, we've obstructed, like, politics to this, like, Dawa thing. And, you know, that's also one of the disco values. It's like these things are fun. Recreating economies are fun. I don't know. At least in our experience, I'm very proud to say that we've formed some lasting friendships and true friendships. Because true friendships is not just when things go well, when you're, like, really well funded and all your technocratic dreams, you know, shine away straight away. But when you go through difficulties, when you need to have the difficult conversations and you need to support each other, I think that this prepares us much better as human beings. And at the personal level, to me, it's been a discooling, sympathizing with these principles and then the the hard work of enacting them because it is hard work because we're not educating to for this. We're not educated to cooperate or to be commoners. But if no one's educating us for this, we better educate ourselves and, yes, make all sorts of mistakes. But as long as we document and open source them, we can at least, find some new patterns. So it's not as hard.
Yeah. I was thinking the joyful militancy of, Federica again, like, how to bring joy again into politics. And, I was also reflecting a bit on the discussion we are having, and, I I was thinking how do we do politics nowadays? And, that's the question of how do we do radical politics and, trying to figure out new ways to do radical politics without ignoring, like, the historicities of, like, specific movements, common movement, that goes much much before the invention of the Internet, obviously. And, the what what's the tradition of the cooperatives brought to us today? And, also, like, how can we do politics within work? And, like, obviously, we can unionize, but, like, how can we unstructured, like, our work? So it's like, for me, this is politics too, and we have to really unpack, like, all the categories and classifications of our lives and working lives till now in order to be able to articulate, like, politics as an as an experienced practice and not just as critical theory. So for me, this is very important. Yeah. I I was engaged into Bandsoft Collective the last years. I think I I'd like to talk mostly about the the last one, the most recent one, because it was formed during, like, the COVID period, and this meant a lot for us. And, it's called Restorative Infrastructures, and it's a techno feminist, network. And we we just we were people that we knew each other for years, but we physically met in 2,019 in Berlin in a, the trans feminist hijacking. And, actually, we realized that it's high time to create a collective that, tries to connect women and people from the LGBTQI community around the world. And we wanted to address, like, all the biases and all the problems that they have been, you know, they have been invisible in the the mainstream hackerspaces around the world and the digital commas like discussions with practices around the world. And we wanted to to to actually enact feminist to do it together pedagogies, and how we can, how can we talk and how can we practice intersectional learning. And the the whole idea of the online and, offline workshops during the COVID period, we are still struggling. And, but we we managed to we we manage to bring together and to be, connected with people that they are in Canada, they are in Cameroon, Stephanie Bootsis, who who who has the feminist, hyperspace in in Vienna. And we we we want to we want to actually, try to articulate a different way of doing technologies and open technologies, and we want to unblock box, like, all these, like, open technologies in a way that is kind of, getting us back into the unlearning, the idea of, like, unlearning things, which is, like, very, very foundational for, for families. So, yes, and also, like, a project we did during COVID, which was, collaborating with makerspace in, which, was, like, very, very small scale small scale project, which also we tended up, like, donating 300 protective seals into the hospitals, to medical personnel. So we managed to gather some money to buy the material and, use the PRUSAM open prototype to do them protective seals there. So, to print them to three d print them in the pre lab makerspace in that sense. So this was, like, a very small initiative, but I think that, like, these initiatives are very important, and they work in, prefigurative politics, realm. But at the same time, they need to, federate, and they need, like, a governance model in order to become, like, cooperatives in order to be able to become sustainable. So for me, that's why I started, like, my sentence of how do we do politics. So it's how do do politics nowadays. So how are we going to unstruct and restructure our work? So how are we going to to to join, like, our activist work with our actual work for livelihood? And this is a concern for people that they are most working class. This is not a concern for people that they want to just do high theory. So this is what DISCO addresses. And, yes, in AI, restorative infrastructures, we are thinking of becoming a DISCO lab. So we are thinking to do this transition of, like, being a collective to being a, a DISCO lab, cooperative, and figuring out, like, governance model that will do this for us.
Nice. I the the impression that I get if if you're in in a disco or want to make a disco and want to start prefiguring your way to a disco or something, it would mean start talking a lot more probably to your coworkers, get getting closer to them, being open about politics, all these different things that I think people are still if you work in at least a normal traditional workplace then, like, you are probably largely very alienated from your coworker and don't really want to talk about these things because it can make things complicated whenever you are working on something. But here in a disco, it's very different. We're overtly talking about politics, and we're overtly, sort of, I think, coming together. And in order to do that, you have to talk a lot more to each other and find ways that you can communicate with each other effectively.
Absolutely. And and also care for each other. And don't just let the outputs of those conversations be kept to your particular disco or work workplace. We're working on ways of, of doing mass documentation of this through semantic media wikis, and we will encourage, like, new discos to adopt semantic media wikis so we can actually have, you know, all these thriving laboratories of economic experimentation and to find the patterns. So, you know, like, if you're based in Paris and you're working in this sector, maybe you find other folks which are which are near you, doing this. And and and, again, have fun. And no one is perfect. We cannot design you know, no one can see the future. But if we're a little bit more kind and we relate to each other, we can be, like, vulnerable. I think that, you know, I don't want to, like, make, make a pitch for productivity as it pertains to activism because, you know, just just just productivity misses out on the whole, relational aspect. But I think that talking to each other and being, like, much more political, you know, in a fun, creative way actually makes you a lot more effective, you know, when you do need to do the the productive stuff. Because you're functioning as a unit that knows to how to relate to each other as humans, not mediated through the algorithm. And I don't think we've mentioned this. One of the strong recommendations that we have is is that you keep your disco to, like, 15 persons max because you can have really meaningful relationships. 15 persons that you're checking in with more often. This does impede that you interface with DAOs, that you interface with other discos, but at a lower rate, but that you have a home to be in. And you can be a nomad. You can be a disco nomad. You can go from one disco to another, etcetera. This is a lot of the stuff that we're working in now to explore those possibilities and to offer a lexicon, and a storytelling. But, again, the people who are developing discos, we have our own experience, but we're a lot more interested in the experiences of other people. And, you know, what do I have to do? What do we have to do if we want to create a disco? With the staff, engaged with us, and we'll be bringing out, more and more resources to make it more off the shelf, to make it just to lay out the options, but also make it inclusive for people who may not come from our technological background to be able to to engage with this in more intuitive ways.
Yeah. Thank thanks for sharing. I was going to ask you what what should people do if they want to, start a disco? But, yeah, I think if you go to disco.coop, there is the manifesto there. I highly recommend reading it. It's very, very thorough. It provides a lot of context as to where what perspective, you are coming from when when describing why disco is important or why you decided to create it, and sort of what I think also very important, like, earlier political traditions that are sort of you are borrowing from, let's say. Yeah. Thanks so much, to the both of you for for coming on, and talking about disco. I know people will be very, very interested in in hearing about this. But maybe just the last thing if you guys want, is there a place where people can keep up with you and your work?
Disco.coop, which is our wonderful domain, and it's so easy to remember. You know, you can graffiti it. You can write it on toilet walls if you want. If you do, thank you. There's a newsletter, which is written by the disco cut, and cut stands for community algorithmic trust, which is the driving factor of the technological design, which is maybe something that we can have another conversation further on further on about. And, yeah, there will be lots of stuff coming out next year, but we're especially interested in hearing from the people that have already gone through the material and say, yeah. We wanna try out, how to become a disco and what it means to you, what it means to you, to you as a group, what is your interpretation contrasted with with ours?
I try to avoid a bit of social media and LinkedIn. I hate it. I have this, big page, academic page. So, actually, I can give, like, yeah, my email will be on this call website. So it's just like they can't get my email from DISCO website, and that's cool. If there is any question about, like, feminist economics and care work and all these things, so we
big shout out to you in podcast. We know that, the audience in your Discord follows Discos. So, you know, we were very excited, you know, to talk to you and to talk to the to the community that you're forming. And it's very important to have, like, a critical vision of blockchains and DAOs, which does take into account this, a hundred and seventy five to a hundred years of, political experimentation, which is also where we come from. So, yeah, it's, it feels homey to to hang out with you.
Well, thanks so much for for coming on. And, yeah, really a pleasure, to have you both. And, yeah, I feel very fortunate to have had you guys on.