Since 2013, MoneyLab has explored questions around the design of money, the democratization of finance, and the new shifts in fintech. On 14 and 15 November, the 7th edition of MoneyLab was held in Amsterdam. At MoneyLab #7: Outside of Finance, we looked beyond the world of libertarian startups with their often masculine preoccupations. From hyperlocal cryptocurrencies at techno festivals to self-organized exchange systems in refugee communities, what are promising design strategies to counter the corporatization of money? Can we imagine a crypto economy that values care work and focuses on equity and solidarity?
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The quest of organization haunts us. If anarchists were once said to defy authority, nowadays we defy organization. Structures are perceived to hold us back and pin us down with the iron cage of identity. The solidified social limits our freedom with its demand of never-ending “engagement.” How desperate is it to live your life as an insulated rebel without a cause? Instead, we should ask, what is pure organization? Is there a new core that we could define and design? What’s commitment outside of today’s technosocial conventions? Are there bonds that create ties, unhinged from procedure, unfettered by bureaucracy? Is there a form of conspiracy that operates without all the tiresome preparations? Mutual aid and local self-organization come to mind, but what if we’re forced to pursue organization of the unorganizables? Does a self-evident General Will exist that does not need to be discussed and exhaustively questioned? Having arrived at this point, we can clearly see the romantic undertone of the Critique of Organization. What’s a lean revolution, an effortless regime change? Can we presuppose a hive mind that performs like an automaton? Humans, coming together, create the Event, simply because of an inner urge to experience relations without guarantees.
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Over the past few years a growing number of artists have critiqued the ubiquity of identity recognition technologies. Specifically, the use of these technologies by state security programs, tech-giants and multinational corporations has met with opposition and controversy. A popular form of resistance to recognition technology is sought in strategies of masking and camouflage. Zach Blas, Leo Selvaggio, Sterling Crispin and Adam Harvey are among a group of internationally acclaimed artists who have developed subversive anti-facial recognition masks that disrupt identification technologies. This paper examines the ontological underpinnings of these popular and widely exhibited mask projects. Over and against a binary understanding and criticism of identity recognition technology, I propose to take a relational turn to reimagine these technologies not as an object for our eyes, but as a relationship between living organisms and things. A relational perspective cuts through dualist and anthropocentric conceptions of recognition technology opening pathways to intersectional forms of resistance and critique. Moreover, if human-machine relationships are to be understood as coming into being in mutual dependency, if the boundaries between online and offline are always already blurred, if the human and the machine live intertwined lives and it is no longer clear where the one stops and the other starts, we need to revise our understanding of the self. A relational understanding of recognition technology moves away from a notion of the self as an isolated and demarcated entity in favour of an understanding of the self as relationally connected, embedded and interdependent. This could alter the way we relate to machines and multiplies the lines of flight we can take out of a culture of calculated settings.
