‘Ownership is the ground where the tug-of-war for the next social contracts is being played. Who owns what will determine who really benefits’

After a contentious early meeting of Green Taxi Cooperative’s driver-members, then in the process of forming the largest taxi company in the state of Colorado, I asked the board president, Abdi Buni, about self-driving cars.

The state legislature had started clearing the way for them on our roads, after all, and the airport was giving Uber and Lyft preference over the local taxis. Buni’s competitors were thinking about them, so what about him?

“We’re really trying to feed a family for the next day,” he said. “When it happens, we’ll make a plan.”

He said this with the kind of weariness about technological wonders that I’ve frequently found among co-op directors – and I could easily understand why. Uber and Google were testing their automatons with billions of dollars from Wall Street in the bank, while Green Taxi was running on what membership fees its mainly immigrant drivers could scrape together.

But the reality was that the self-driving cars were not some distant future that could be put off. As investors poured money into the car-sharing apps in anticipation of automation, the apps put so much pressure on Denver’s taxi industry that drivers fled their old companies for a better deal in their own co-op.

In that sense, it was as if the robots had already come. Green Taxi owed its existence to them.

There are two stories commonly told about robots these days. One is that, in the not-too-distant future, some enormous percentage of jobs currently being done by people will be taken over by computers, and the workers will be left twiddling their thumbs. The other is that, like past periods of technological change, job markets will simply evolve, and new, better things will arise for us to do.

The truth is neither – and everything in between. I say so, not by having any special insight into the future, but by noticing certain features of the present.

For instance, while it might look to some observers in affluent, urban areas that we’ve entered a post-industrial age, more stuff than ever is being produced on this planet, with human hands very much involved – it’s just that this is happening in different places.

Even where old factories have turned into apartment lofts, jobs show no particular sign of going away – they’re just less secure. People in places where it was once possible to support a family on one standard, career-long salary are becoming used to lifetimes of gigs, found and mediated by machines. Social contracts are shifting, while companies, governments, workers, and myth-makers are vying to set the new rules. It’s not a sudden robot apocalypse, it’s a longer, slower tug-of-war.

The winners will be the owners. Many of the world’s highest valued firms claim the title because they own vast, vast stores of data – data about us, data that can feed their algorithms.

Ownership is the ground where the tug-of-war for the next social contracts is being played. Who owns what will determine who really benefits. The owners, also, decide which tasks to invest in automating and what happens to the people who used to do those tasks.

Right now, a few very powerful conglomerates are likely to dominate this contest, companies based primarily on the west coast of the United States and in China. They are only getting stronger, as is their capacity to pull what they need from the rest of society and remake the rules on their terms. In new guises, this is a story we have seen before. It’s the story of railroad barons, big banks, and big boxes, of economic bullies that provoked people to create their own economies of scale through co-operative enterprise.

It begins with thinking about automation like owners do, not like victims of it. In worker co-ops, rather than fearing how machines might take work away, workers can imagine how they could use those machines to make their lives easier – in ways better and fairer than the investor-owners would. Consumer, purchasing, and marketing co-ops can use data visualization to demonstrate the superiority of their supply chains. The less people have to do to maintain all this, the more they can turn to opportunities for creativity.

Co-ops thrive when they discover how to do what other kinds of companies can’t or won’t do. Co-operative AI, also, may be intelligent in ways the investor-owned counterparts can’t be.

Emerging data co-ops like MIDATA (for medical data) and GISC (for farmers’ data) are built for privacy and transparency, while many of their competitors optimise for surveillance and central control.

TheGoodData harvests the proceeds from members’ web-browsing habits for micro-lending programs, and Robin Hood Co-operative runs an algorithm that prowls financial markets for opportunities to fund public-domain projects. This kind of data can in turn inform future co-op robots, like the flying drones that Texas utility co-ops used last year to restore power after Hurricane Harvey struck the state.

Rather than worrying about how robots and apps will make their current business models harder, co-ops should ask how smart, member-focused automation can set them apart. But the barriers are real: This takes economies of scale, and co-ops need to band together to create them.

For instance, there are driver co-operatives like Green Taxi all around the world – what if they created a shared hailing app that customers could use wherever they go, and pooled the data for mutual benefit?

Meanwhile, consumer car-sharing co-ops like Modo in Vancouver are well-poised to be leaders in adopting driverless vehicles – accountable to the local community, not to far-away investors. In hard-to-automate service professions like house-cleaning and childcare, platforms like Loconomics and Up & Go are using co-operation to automate marketing and payment so workers can focus on –and get paid better for – doing their core jobs.

The 20th century was full of science fiction about technology making people’s lives better and freer, but we’ve wound up with a 21st century of worsening inequality and insecure incomes.

The world of The Jetsons doesn’t arrive automatically. In order for the benefits of technology to be shared more widely, the ownership of it must be shared, too. Co-operation is uniquely well-suited to do this.

Reposted from The News Coop

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We are architects of economic space

Back in the day we were a group of hard core researchers of the coming forms of economy and organization.

We knew that it will not be a picnic when we started using thinkers like Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, and then the Italian autonomist writers, Toni Negri, Christian Marazzi, Paolo Virno, Maurizio Lazzarato, Franco Berardi, and others like Gabriel Tarde, Gilbert Simondon, George Bataille, Alfred North Whitehead, Rene Girard to study and understand economy, finance and organization. But we knew that this was the right way if we were to really grasp how post-Fordist economy, semiocapitalism, immaterial and affective labor, and the financial technologies work and intertwine with our destiny.

With these thinkers we were able to discern a couple of interesting things:

— How signs and meanings are part of real production and not only some kind ideology or superstructure of production. They have historically different ways of functioning.
— How the dynamic of the production of value is in the organization of a heterogeneity, of heterogeneous forces, and not only in the relationship between capital and labor.
— How information overflow and semiotic inflation lead to imitation.
— How finance can curb time, how it is essentially a technology to affect the future from the present.
— How economy is essentially about organization, not of action, but its potentiality.
— What is the nature of an organization which is not based on division of work, but on dividing into an open space, on opening to the uncertain and indeterminate possibility.
— How the meaning of autonomy is in internal displacements, shiftings, iterations, settlings and dissolutions that are the process of the self-composition. That autonomy means to be able to set the attractors of one’s own behavior.

So they helped us understand how the paradoxes of immaterial production and precarious work, the blurring of the boundaries between economy and politics, cause problems to the approaches and distinctions of industrial economy and its institutions. We needed to start creating new concepts and imagining new social and financial forms.

And we understood that the common ground of art and politics is in the collapse of old forms of society, economy and subjectivity and in the creation of new forms. This is where they meet, and this is where we found ourselves in work.

What can these new forms be today? How can they be created?

These questions meant the birth of Robin Hood Asset Management. It was a new form, a new combination, a paradox or a monster that didn’t fit the boundaries of our normal life, the easy flow of things and action. It was the first economic space we engineered.

Robin Hood Asset Management

So what do you do when you see what “financial services” offer ordinary people? Not services so much, rather a way to bail out financial industry with our tax money. Do you get depressed and cynical or get angry and go protest? Good! But maybe one can also get more hands on. With a hacker attitude; doing it yourself, doing it with others.

Our pilot in hacking finance to create new social and financial forms was Robin Hood Asset Management — a hedge fund with a twist. In fact, three twists. First, it is a cooperative. Individuals who buy shares become members and decide how the coop is run. One member, one vote. Second, per the Robin Hood principle, part of the profit generated by the fund is invested into projects building the commons. Third, the money put into the fund is managed by an algorithm called “the Parasite”. She logs into the brains of the bankers at Wall Street, deconstructs them into databanks, and uses big data analysis and structured finance to share their most important means of production to everyone.

By creating in our portfolio a synthetic replica of the emerging conventions of the financial elite at the market, we create a simulacrum, a monstrous false power, whose repetition yields a difference in kind. A bad copy of the financial asset accumulation model opens suddenly into something else. We copy the most important means of production of the fat cats at Wall Street — their knowledge, relations, positions — and use them in a way that does not belong to the orthodox economic space. This is what we call minor asset management.

Robin Hood, as an umbrella term, is a project towards giving people access to the operating system of finance, to open source finance. At the moment it is in the process of transitioning its member and share management on the Ethereum blockchain, which makes possible an effective secondary market for coop shares and the deployment of new algorithms, in addition to the Parasite. The new one in development is a shorting target identification algorithm called the “Sting”. Moreover, members can start managing and curating commons-oriented projects directly, without the need for overarching decisions by the whole coop. This is the vision for Robin Hood: to merge and re-engineer the financial and the social so that new forms become possible.

Economic Space Agency 

The next step takes the logic further: not only stealing from the rich and giving to the poor (like Robin Hood did), but exploring, building new ecologies, new ecosystems, new universes, new possibilities, new worlds of value. For this purpose the Robin Hood hydra grew a new head: a start-up company Economic Space Agency, Inc. (ECSA). Economic Space Agency builds tools with which we can create economic space — not only to distribute something existing or produced in a pre-existing space, but to reorganize/rebuild the space itself. Two trends are converging and making open source economy possible: the moldability and plasticity of financial technologies and the decentralization and disintermediation provided by distributed ledgers.

ECSA’s DNA contains all these things: hard core research (the team has published over 25 books), direct engagement with the power of art to create unforeseen (economical, social, political, financial, incorporeal) processes, financial first-in-the-world inventions (such as a hedge fund as a coop, and asset-backed cryptoequity), experimental hands-on attitude and an intimate lived experience of how the financial and the social co-determine each other.

We are developing tools with which you can tailor your own economic space, a place where we can autonomously set the parameters and attractors of our economic behaviour. The name of our first product, Sherwood, reflects the spirit of finding a place to plan, experiment and act together. It offers you a space and tools to “phase transition” what you are doing or want to do into a liquid form both financially and socially.

The new network technologies will produce a radically different economy. We are building tools for you to start exploring and operating it.

Image: Economic Space Agency

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Most of us are allergic to finance because it doesn’t work for us. It closes down possibilities and creativity. We have the idea that it could be different, that it could be creative.

Our first attempt was to create an activist hedge fund, to give people with ?€60 access to the same mechanisms that rich people use to get even richer. We suck value from Wall Street and promote a profit sharing model, where a percent goes to yourself and a percent to commons projects. The membership decides where to divert funds to.

Although we’re about 600 big as a co-op, there’s probably about 10 people really driving the day to day routine tasks. We could foresee that we were all going to burn out.

At first we were running the meetings physically, in Helsinki, which of course meant only a percent of the oroganisation turned up. We decided to use Loomio to encourage more participation.

We went from 10 members participating to 200-300 actively participating, within one year.

Broadly, we wanted the support of the wider membership, because we can’t do this alone. Loomio was awesome for that because it allows a multi-faceted conversation, whether you want to contribute in a larger way or just put a thumbs up.

It really gave us kind of a temperature check of the organisation, of whether we were thinking in sync with the people in the co-op.

One of the main propositions of Robin Hood is breaking the taboo of who can manage monetary flows, on Wall Street for example. It’s a monstrous idea that artists and hackers could go and do that – but we have.

Did we accept that as the main legacy we leave behind? Or did we want to proactively, together as a community, keep trying to break that egg and open up economic space for more people? I can’t over emphasise how important that decision was.

Some of us could have said, ‘Right, we’re going to go hack away on another project, whatever it might be’. But we decided to stick together with the wider co-op and go in that direction.

It was really make or break. And I really don’t think we could have done that over email, which is how we were doing it before. How do you have a conversation over email with 600 people?

When you’ve seen something work so well – and so many of your peers, communities, and networks are using a tool and it’s being of benefit – it opens up what we call a ‘space’. We’re working with economic ‘space’.

What Loomio has done is open up the organisational possibilities for people working together.

You can join the Robin Hood Co-op yourself with €60.

Originally published in the Loomio blog.

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Now here is an improbable idea:an activist hedge fund.Out of Tampere, Finland, comes the Robin Hood Asset Management Coop, which legally speaking, is an investment cooperative. It is designed to skim the cream off of frothy investments in the stock market to help support commoners. As the website for the coop describe it:

We use financial technologies to democratize finance, expand financial inclusion and generate new economic space.Robin Hood’s proposition is no different than it was 600 years ago in Sherwood: arbitrage the routes of wealth and distribute the loot as shared resources. Today we just use different methods to achieve the same:we analyze big data, write algorithms, deploy web-based technologies and engineer financial instruments to create and distribute surplus profits for all. Why?Simply, we believe a more equitable world is a better one.

The Robin Hood Coop currently has 808 members from some 15 countries, and manages about 651,000 euros in various stock market investments. Started in June 2012, the coop has generated over 100,000 euros for its members and to its common pool, which is used to support commons projects. Robin Hood reports that in its first year, it had “the third most profitable rate of return in the world of all the hedge funds.”

Anyone can join the coop for a 30€ membership fee, which entitles members to invest a minimum of 30€.Members can then choose eight different options for splitting any profits (after costs) among their own accounts, Robin Hood Projects and the general Robin Hood Fund. Most members choose a simple 50-50 split of profits to themselves and Robin Hood Projects. For the past two full years of its operations, the project has been profitable. (As of November 19, however, net asset value was down 6.38%.) Robin Hood says that its operating costs are quite low compared to normal asset management services provided by banks.

The enterprise is driven by Robin Hood’s “dynamic data-mining algorithm,” which it calls “Parasite,” because it tracks actual transactions in US stock markets and mimics the best market actors. The coop’s website explains:“The parasite listens to the feed of the NYSE, watching for traders and what they trade. Then it competency ranks traders, identifying ones that are constantly making money on specific stocks. When it sees that a consensus is forming among such competent traders, it follows.” Robin Hood appears to be out-performing many leading hedge funds and reaping impressive returns, and it provides a modest but welcome source of income for some commons projects.

I do have my doubts about the transformative impact of the project. Is it really changing the system, and is it “stealing” anything from the King’s forests? It seems to be playing by the King’s rules, albeit more successfully than many other players. What’s different is its channeling of its gains to commoners and commons-based projects rather than to the 1%. This has great value in its own right while bypassing the philanthropic or nonprofit intermediaries who often don’t really see or care about the commons.

As a financial enterprise, the Robin Hood Project has a rather unusual interest in “art, politics and finance” – and more broadly in subjective experience and cultural theory. The project’s website features a page for n-1 publications, a book publisher whose authors include Susan Sontag, Michel Foucault, Felix Guattari, and other cultural critics. In an interview on the website, Chairman of the Robin Hood Board, Akseli Virtanen, invokes Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, and Italian theorists such as Christian Marazzi and Maurizio Lazzarato. Not the usual bedtime reading of financiers.

Virtanen explains that the Robin Hood Coop is a cultural experiment in creating new forms and subjectivities by using the financial apparatus in paradoxical and “monstrous” ways. This has apparently prompted some reporters to question the very existence of the Robin Hood portfolio. Virtanen responds by citing audit reports from Ernst & Young, legal registration papers, and other such totems of trust. He adds:

“Robin Hood sounds like a ponzi scheme, a fake, or it could be a private group of aggressive entrepreneurs ready to take advantage of the naïve cultural people. It could be a hoax, a scam, or just an ‘art project’. It definitely parasites also the old ideal of community and cooperation. It is unallowable, impossible and disgusting… a monster… but it corresponds to our subjectivity.”

I confess that I had trouble following some of Virtanen’s reflections about the cultural significance of the Robin Hood Coop. Still, he makes some good points: The very idea of “value” IS a flimsy social construction, and Robin Hood is eager to provoke us to think about that. Why should we trust the official documentation about financial value when it is itself so abstract, arbitrary and almost theological?

The truth is, the meaning of value is elusive and socially contingent, and capitalist totems of value are in many respects laughable. No wonder conmen like Bernie Madoff could so easily exploit gullible investors. The trusted representations of “value” are so remote from the real economy and actual value that they can be easily manipulated to defraud people.

So Robin Hood has funded some worthy projects with the yields from its portfolio, and it has considered an impressive array of applicants. Its criteria: “Only projects that are bigger than only for themselves can be selected — projects that open up the common space, that produce the commons.”Projects must be “generative and expansive, generating growth in subjectivities, in possibilities, in organization, in sharing, in scale, in mobility, in access, in independence, in desire. They should make our existential territory more habitable.”

Among the recent projects funded are Casa Nuven, an autonomous, self-managed space in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, with 5,000 euros, as well as the P2P Foundation’s project with the Catalan Integral Cooperative and Commons Transition in Spain, with 4,000 euros. Check out the many applicants for Robin Hood funding here.

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Robin Hood Coop is proud to announce its first round of funding for commons producing projects. The coop supports Casa Nuvem in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, with 5000 euros, the P2P Foundation’s project with the Catalan Integral Cooperative and Commons Transition in Spain with 4000 euros, and the Radio Schizoanalytique and the Steki in Northern Greece with 6000 euros.

Robin Hood Asset Management Coop was founded in 2012 as an investment bank for the precariat. The goal of the coop is to build new economic space by giving its members access to investment banking (just 60€ is enough) and by allocating a part of the profits to building the commons through sponsoring projects.

Casa Nuvem (see also here) is an autonomous self managed space in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, resulting from the convergence between art, activism, sound, audio-visual and new technologies experimentation. It was born early 2013 from the desire to think and build the future collectively, and to provide grounds for resilience and mobilization in the context of Rio’s wide social injustice and lack of basic rights, continuously intensified by the state policies related to the mega events such as the upcoming Olympics next year. Casa Nuvem is a place of work, research and production that hosts several independent collaborative projects focused on the creation of new exchanges between people and the public space, guided by a festive occupation of the city. Regular actions, workshops, seminars and other open activities are organized in the house, besides frequent interventions in outside target locations. It cooperates intensively with other groups and actors in a network of interactions that values above all the respect towards differences, respect for freedom of expression, freedom of the body, multiplicity of gender, the right to the city and alternative mobility.
(Project proposal)

The P2P Foundation in involved in a practical, grassroots effort to animate a Commons Transition strategy, in real time and real community. The foundation is working as a team with the Catalan Integral Cooperative (aka the CIC) to achieve a self-managed, post-capitalist society based on P2P principles and environmental and social realities. The ultimate goal is to realize a well-expressed, researched and tested set of plans and proposals, ultimately providing concrete examples in real time. In the project, CIC expands and implements the theoretical material proposed by the P2PF in the Commons Transition platform, and the P2PF produces an updated body of work to reflect the experience and shares it with other collectives.
(Project proposal)

Radio Schizonalaytique and the Steki are a project in the Skouries-­Kakkavos mountains in Northern Greece, where the Canadian “low-­cost” gold mining company Eldorado owns and operates mining sites. Local communities have been organized against the construction of an open pit mine and processing plant since 2006. After a house built to monitor the activities of the mine was destroyed, the main organizers transformed an empty storefront into a community action center for hosting workshops, lectures, screenings and cultural events, and as a social center to nurture the creation of a sustainable future for the region. One of the key features of the Steki is the online and FM radio project “Radio Schizoanalitique”, a collaborative project between the activists in Megali Panagia and artists in Berlin, designed to break the control the mining company and its proponents have on the local media.
(Project proposal)

Robin Hood Coop is an activist hedge fund with a twist. Individuals who buy shares become members and decide how the coop is run. One member, one vote. Per the Robin Hood principle, part of the profit generated by the fund is invested into projects building the commons. Third, the money put into the fund is placed in the stock exchange by a big data mining algorithm.

During its first two years of operation, 2012 – 2014, the coop’s portfolio was able to generate enough profit so that the coop decided to allocate 15 000 euros to projects that build and augment the commons. Members of the coop made proposals of projects to fund during March 2015. In total there were 49 proposals. The selection was done in two steps. First, a committee of three members was chosen by lottery out of volunteers. The committee went through all the proposals, discussed on criteria and negotiated, and came to an unanimous agreement of suggesting 3 projects to be funded. The committee’s proposal was then ratified by a general member’s meeting of the coop.

For more info, contact: [email protected]

http://robinhoodcoop.org
http://projects.robinhoodcoop.org
http://discourse.robinhoodcoop.org

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