Saraswathi is an artist, technoculturist, and hobby regenerist. She currently works as a design lead for a distributed basic income protocol, Circles, and supports a group of regenerative learners building the inevitably just and ecological future – Xyrden.

Hey Saraswathi, nice to have you. Tell me – what’s your background and research interests? 

I’m half Polish and half Indian, my parents are both immigrants. I grew up in California. As a result I have a multiracial experience and sense of identity that almost undermines placehood. And maybe that’s one of the reasons why I got drawn to cryptocurrency and stateless basic income. 

I studied Technocultural Studies as an undergrad, which is the study of technology and culture, and received a masters at the Interactive Telecommunications Program, which was at a rapid prototyping maker / hacker lab in New York at NYU. 

My training as a technoculturist didn’t center on one particular discipline, so when I entered the professional working world I really wasn’t sure what I’d do. I realized that from having prototyped a bunch I had some experience designing interfaces, and so ended up exploring user experience design. I was 5 years into that when I encountered Ethereum through a mentor of mine.

What drew you to Ethereum and Universal Basic Income? 

This was not long after the Occupy Movement. I think that was the first of the series of crises that really defined our generation and contemporary life. So when I heard about blockchain, I actually cried, because to me it indicated something miraculous. In a situation where we were up against a wall in terms of how we might re-vision a deeply broken system, something previously impossible to imagine appeared. I felt it was extraordinarily creative as a way of addressing the centralization of power. Or at least that’s how it seemed at the time. 

But I ended up working in the Ethereum ecosystem and found it woefully short on economic alternatives. I remember hanging out with people working in crypto, and I was wearing a Matrix Reloaded hat as an ironic joke – that movie sucked, and I felt that we were finding our way out of “the matrix” with this new technology. But at a certain point I realized that my dumb hat was prophetic. The matrix was in fact being reloaded. Blockchain started to look like a shitty sequel to late capitalism. It was hypercapitalism 2.0, a copy/paste of the previous irredeemable system, and there were little to no humanistic economic alternatives being presented with these new currencies. I had been hugely naive thinking that the decentralization of finance meant a redistribution of power. And that was crushing. Simultaneously Donald Trump has just won in America. It was a rude and raw waking up, in a world that felt less and less safe, and it felt very personal. That put a lot of pressure on me to find something worthwhile to do. 

So I asked around in the cryptocurrency space — “this is really a let down, is this anything going on here that is actually game changing or socially valuable?”

A good friend of mine told me that there was this project called Circles, that a lot of folks had been eyeing it but no one had really picked it up. I began to lead it from my end. It always has been very consciously non-hierarchical. But I took a leadership role and began to explore what this could be like, and slowly a team formed around the project.

What is the idea behind Circles?

Circles is a redesign of money itself. It’s helpful to know the origins of money through the lens of centralization of banking and the federal reserve. Most folks don’t know that the dominant money we all use is created as debt. This contemporary money was forged in deep inequality.The monetary system we currently use was designed before black folks or women could vote. Today’s money, known as fiat currency, was a tool forged in the skewed power structures that we see exacerbated today to the point of massive global uprisings. 

What was interesting for me in the cryptocurrency space was that money became something malleable, a tool that could be recreated, an invention, not something granted, or God-sent – but human-made. It was designed once and was overdue to be designed again. In that sense Circles for me is an experimental artwork or a meme that points to the reality that economics are created, and can be creative. 

That was a long answer. The short answer is that Circles is a decentralized complementary currency that is regularly distributed to all participants equally and universally – similar to UBI. 

What is the innovation introduced by Circles?

First of all, Circles is  a redesign of money to be justly distributed on creation, with no major benefit to early adopters. It is not backed by debt, but by trust within your community.

Circles is also speculation-resistant, it’s a currency that loses value over time, which incentivizes circulation over hoarding. One reference for this approach is known as the Miracle of Worgl. During an economic recession in this small Austrian town they issued a local demurrage, or decaying, currency. It was wildly successful in rebuilding town infrastructure. It was actually the only town in Europe to renovate it’s infrastructure during that period – because people needed jobs, and found support for their local economy when global economics failed. The central bank shut that project down.

Capital and capitalism are not mutually inclusive. When we think about capital as means of exchange, we don’t need to design capitalism. This is why I feel what we approach with Circles is a postcapitalist currency. 

It’s a good moment to repeat that Circles is an artwork, a pragmatic work of art. 

Who is the target audience of Circles? 

Circles is a work of art, with utility. 

We’ve explored some circumstances where alternative currencies could have a unique value proposition.  One of them is alongside an Unconditional Autonomous Allowance, or UAA. It’s an interesting extension of the commons and the meeting of human needs through resources rather than currency. When we deal with basic income, it’s really important to consider that. Without resources, income is useless. And there are contexts where communities are exploring sovereignty by way of the maintenance of a commons. Some strong examples are ecovillages, for example Tamera, Damanhur, or Aurville, but also in Greece where the economy collapsed and they have started solidarity healthcare networks to support each other.

These places are regenerative contexts, growing their own food on their own land with ecological practices and building care economies. Basic income is interesting to me in these contexts, where Circles can be commonly owned and commonly run. The intention of Circles is that it be a community-developed initiative. It ideally can meet the specific needs of communities rather than becoming a hegemonic currency for the whole world. 

It is decentralized, it is open source and we don’t actually ultimately have control over who uses it and where the experiment leads. 

When we talk about where it could work, it’s totally speculative. It can work in an urban context, or in a global context as well. It’s really open-ended, but I am curious about how it can support smaller community contexts and municipalities. 

Who is in the team behind Circles? 

At the moment Circles is a team of 5 people from 5 countries that came together to co-create this experiment. It’s also a really nice reference point when we think about the origin of capital as we know it versus what’s possible when we begin to revise how certain parts of the world function. 

The current Circles team is also more than 50% female. And that is relatively unheard of in tech and specifically cryptocurrency. Our team members have backgrounds in art, decentralization, economic anthropology, community organizing, music, politics and activism. 

Where are you at with the project? 

We are in beta, Circles launched with around 100 people in February using a basic Burner wallet in a browser.

Can you share some experiences and lessons learned from working together in this decentralized context? 

I’ve worked on Circles for 3 years. In that time we went through about 3 or 4 different versions of the team setup, and I have a lot of hard won lessons from that. Circles is open source and is a super idealistic and values-driven project that has drawn a lot of really smart and optimistic people. One lesson for me about starting an organization and really getting it off the ground, was about working in a collaborative context with volunteers. The lesson is that eventually volunteers need to get paid, otherwise they naturally will go get other jobs. We had to figure out a way to make sure that people can sustain this work. 

Another lesson is that it’s also very appealing to work with volunteers because they are authentically enthusiastic, but when you are trying to accomplish something specific it’s important that these people can do what needs to be done – which often requires experience and even expertise. Make sure that if you’re trying to accomplish something you have not the team that appears, but the team that you know can get it done. 

In one iteration of Circles the team was completely flat and voted on everything. It was completely democratic in structure and that failed – and it failed hard. Folks were voting on things they’d never heard of in their life, for example whether we should get an AGPL license – for someone who never worked in tech and has other full time work, this is so far out of your lane, but that’s how we were structured. The struggle to handle information asymmetry, even in a small group, is real. When you are working towards a specific and time sensitive goal, teaching the whole team how coding cryptocurrency works is too tall of an order.

I would not do it specifically that way ever again, thought that’s not to say that we won’t continue to explore more thoughtfully implemented democratic or cooperative structures. Straight-up flatness stifled our ability to execute and deliver on promises we made to many people, including ourselves. When coordinating as syndicalists to an end, there are innate hierarchies that need to be honoured in order for things to function. Those are hierarchies of expertise and experience, and they do not have to equate to power over others. 

If you are thinking of embarking on a project like that I’m always happy to talk about it. I’m always happy to talk about it. 

How’s the collaboration at Circles looking now, after all these trials and tribulations?

Now we trust that people are taking decisions in their area of their expertise, and that they know what they are doing. There’s no formal process. There’s a natural accountability rather than a formalized system of accountability. I believe that in small groups – 5 people or less – that can be highly effective. Scaling is a different story.

What’s next for Circles? And how can people get involved? 

Circles launches in October 2020. One way to get involved is to go to circles.garden and get a basic income. The second way is starting a community and using Circles as means of exchange. 

If you’re a developer, Circles is open source, and you are welcome to support it. If you’re involved in policy and want to learn more, you can contact us and explore that possibility. 

This project isn’t owned by anyone, so consider it yours 🙂 

Nice 🙂 And what’s next for Saraswathi? Can you tell me about your path forward beyond involvement in Circles?

After spending a decade as a creative technologist working in the more abstract and immaterial realms of economics and cryptocurrency, I am eager to engage in the more material aspects of living, like.. soil, and ecology. 

Probably for most of us there’s a really deep desire to be of service to this world, and since the origin of cryptocurrency in the financial collapse of 2008 we’ve been handed a veritable bouquet of crises to attend to! What was amazing for me about getting into cryptocurrency wasn’t only blockchain itself – but all of what’s adjacent to it. It was especially interesting to go to ecovillages to explore decentralized governance and community currencies, and I came out of it with more questions about regenerative cultures, about living ecologically. To me these places were like petri dishes offering glimpses at an alternative society, and some of these experiments were quite mature.

I realized that what we are really doing right now it’s just the tip of an iceberg. The rest of that iceberg is made of frameworks for what the world could look like were it reorganized to be just, ecological, and regenerative – there’s Rojava, there’s social ecology, there’s decentralized governance in community contexts, there’s the creation of technology within ecological limits, their circular systems, the list of what to learn has only grown. 

What are the key topics that you have been exploring? And how did it lead you to creating your community, xyrden?

The topics that I was getting into before,when I started exploring blockchains, were game theory, mechanism design, decentralized governance, prediction markets, and artwork that explored decentralization. But what was really frustrating about it it’s that it was predominantly neoliberal politics that was being recycled or re-tooled. Luckily for me I found a handful of people who found that untenable and were dreaming of building another world, who were finding each other in the ugly haze of the matrix reloaded and knew they really wanted to start exploring alternatives. 

We would meet once every two weeks to vent, and it felt to me we were all trying to build the same world. It was incredible – we came from different projects, yet were aligned in the world we were working toward. I started to call that world xyrden. 

How come xyrden? 

Xyrden came to me out of the blue but it was also stitched together from the things that resonated with me – one of them was a set of imaginary genders that seemed to me like a futuristic unoccupied space of identity. A gender beyond gender. Xyr also brings to mind cosmicomics, which is a book by Italo Calvino about the primordial world, where he personifies atoms as they drift through space, encountering each other sporadically and enthusiastically over eons. And they have names, like Qfwfq, that to me feel both ancient and futuristic, and somehow timeless in their absurdity. 

So there’s xyr and there’s den. 

And den is the natural space, a space of recreation, as well as a reference to Eden, or the world prior to separation, where we were in presence with our connectedness to all being. Where we understood our actions beyond action, from a space of play and innocence, and where we could be free.

That’s not to overload xyrden spiritually, cause it’s also a very practical and material discovery of our inevitably just and ecological world. 

The intention in placing xyr by eden, is to queer eden. It’s telling that one of the most widely known origin stories of our time, if not the most, is patriarchal and heteronormative despite being a tale of oneness. Queering it is a small antidotal step toward I feel is truer.

Did it start as a meme sharing group? 

No, though it is also a meme collective on Instagram. 

Why are memes such an important medium of connection and expression these days? 

Memes are bite sized propaganda on one level, as well as a way to take really complex concepts and reduce them to something digestible and replicable. Memes are also delightful, which is really cool. Reading Deleuze or Adorno or Foucault can be really taxing, plus it’s kind of classist. Academic language can limit people’s ability to access certain concepts, and academia barricades complex thought behind institutional doors. So memes are radical because they can disseminate important and often incessible information. But then you can also shitpost, which is legit. It’s a free medium. 

What’s your vision for xyrden? 

I have a lot of visions for xyrden, it’s a free-flowing and shapeshifting vision itself. One thing I felt resonant with is that it’s a multi-being being rendering the future’s now. Something like a future artificial intelligence. Like travelling to the past in order to ensure the future. 

It reminds me of how Elon Musk and Grimes met. They bonded over “Rococco Baslik” a pun about an AI that sends itself into the past to destroy anyone who didn’t help in its making. I sometimes think of xyrden along the same lines, in a non-sinister way. What do you do to promote a now that creates the inevitable future that is ecological and just?

I’ve also thought about it as a school or social network. Something mycelial that’s a learning experience for the next world, because this world is collapsing, and all of us have a lot of unlearning and learning to do. We are co-creators, finding what feels good. Feeling what we want our future to be and creating spaces for it in ourselves and in communities is exciting and needed, and we must enjoy the world we want.

What are the online places where you exist, where do people connect to xyrden? 

In my off-hours I’m working on a social network. There’s the meme account on Instagram and there’s a group chat on Telegram. Xyrden is also on Relevant. We hold reading groups on the inevitably just and ecological future. Those reading groups have been about degrowth, social ecology, emergent strategy, transformative justice, prison police abolition, and grief. There’s some other ones too. You can see the index at radne.ws

What are the topics that are the most important to the group?

We are in the moment where we’ve walked off the cliff of our imagination as a society and there are certain concepts that are so new to many, and so radically suggestive of meaningful societal alternatives. For example degrowth. Many people have never had words to even begin to articulate how we might live in a post-growth world. So we’re living in unarticulated sci-fi right now, we are living in an extraordinarily dystopian moment. And I think it’s really important to speak the language of the possible worlds that we can usher in. The more people who have the words, the more of these realities can come alive. The more deeply we can articulate even a moderately utopian premise, the closer that universe gets. 

What are the practical and tangible activities bringing us close to that utopia that you pursue? 

I don’t think we are there yet. 

We practice for xyrden though – anytime we experiment organizationally, anytime we experiment with postcolonial postcapitalist strategy in action, its practice, anytime we try, anytime we fail. Anytime we exercise transformative justice in lieu of punishment. Anytime we perform care and mutual aid, and relate to the world as a network of care, anytime we can act in it like an interdependent community with needs that are valid and valued beyond the transactional – everytime we share, everytime we “common”, or engage in commoning together… All of that is practicing for xyrden. All of that is surfacing the world that’s no longer dying, calling in the lush and thriving heartspace we will reveal together. 

Would you say this is about recovering something that has been lost in modernity, or in the globalized context. Is this about going back in time, or going back to a village? 

Often in a paved parking lot you’ll find cracks in the asphalt, and in the cracks you’ll see dandelions. Life always finds a way to break through. At some point in time when the parking lot erodes and is no longer there – will it mean that we have gone backwards? No – life is still there. I think the communal aspect of humanity, for example, is similar to what we find in the dandelion. It’s as fundamental as life – not primitivist. The fact that something is reoccurring doesn’t necessarily make it primitive, it makes it fundamental. It makes it as persistent and humble as a dandelion. New dandelions sprout everyday. They are also an edible wild food with lots of healing properties, by the way..

If we stopped using fossil fuels, or even solar power, I still wouldn’t consider it primitivist. We could do it in a very modern way, we can do high tech post-energy. I’d love to see it. 

What’s the reading list of xyrden? 

Murray Bookchin, Brown, Angela Davis, Abdullah Ocalan, Jason Hickel, Donna Haraway, Margaret McFall-Ngai. 

Tell us more about your perspective on the commons and commoning. 

The idea of the commons is pre-capitalist. We are all born on this Earth and without the concept of private property, we would hold this land in common. No single person beyond the concept of capital would have the rights to ownership of this world we’ve been gifted. The commons is a recognition of our birth right, which is the sharing of this world together. What we see through history is enclosure which is the privatization of the commons, which includes water, earth, air and selling of what we share in exchange for profit. 

One might argue that privatization is a form of maintenance of the commons but at this point that person would have to recognize that it’s a travesty. Privatization is a huge failure. 

Privatization has not maintained the commons. We have decimated things to the point of extinction. Acknowledgment and recognition of that which we share and redistributing responsibility for maintenance, ideally at a fairly localized level, is pretty fundamental to the ideals of social ecology, circular economics or degrowth. It’s essentially a new level of awareness that’s very needful as we watch the world burn.

Do these places of commoning exist in the pockets of capitalism?

You can do some stuff outside of the monolith of capitalism. The commons is a way to meet certain needs outside of capital, through communal participation, through systems of relationships within a community. By commoning you could greatly reduce the reliance on contemporary capital to meet your fundamental needs. 

This is also what the members of xyrden are doing? 

Most folks are experimenting with commoning. And that includes foraging. The recognition that wilderness is an abundant space where you can find food, legitimately. Even in public spaces there’s free “resources” that we can harvest and maintain if we have to. You can common in an urban environment, you can common in a rural environment, and you can common anywhere in between.

Commoning doesn’t necessarily mean dramatic exit from society – it depends at what level you want to do it. Ecovillages are examples of community maintenance. The LA ecovillage for example is a self-governing community in Korea Town on a land trust, which means they can’t speculate on the real estate that they share. They all take responsibility for something that they can’t sell away for profit. 

It’s important to note that commoning does not entail a dramatic exit of society, because many people see it in this way.. 

You can start commoning right now. You could start a lending library in your neighbourhood. You can start a guerilla garden on your street or other projects aimed at maintaining a common good. 

And does it mean it doesn’t need rules or regulations, it’s based on trust? 

Typically when you are really dependent on the commons there’s a web of social relationships and accountabilities you are enmeshed in. There’s less to be gained from selfishness than to be gained from participating in the production of the common good. In a way this is what people mean when they speak to “care economies” – supporting the common good is an act of self and community care.

Do you see any different approach to “commoning” between LA and Berlin? 

The short answer is no. It’s context dependent, and has nothing to do with statehood. However it does have everything to do with the context of common good you are maintaining, what it is, the needs of the participants, and what is shared. 

Who keeps track of these commoning activities?
That’s what I want xyrden to be. A network of those activities. I think it’s a really incredible moment for the parallel society that people are already participating in to grow in activity. To share resources and knowledge. We all need this next world. We need to be closer to the land, to community, to each other. You don’t necessarily need to go somewhere to make it happen, you just need to discover what you already have and tend to it like you would to a garden. 

So you are hopeful about the future? 

It depends on the day. If it’s just me in a peaceful place, I’m often in love with, moved and grateful for life. When I’m reading the news – I’m often not. However things like Black Lives Matter, the reality that the cracks in the system are so wide you can’t miss them – I feel that beyond that chaos there’s a new system. Now is a really important moment to imagine and engage the future we want. We are looking at the rubble of someone’s failed utopia. Everything is someone’s failed utopia – Capitalism is someone’s failed utopia. It looks decimated, and like a trash fire. I would say those who are xyrdening are likely anti-capitalist, antiracist, ready to abolish the police and prisons. Because all  of that is an abhorrently violent death cult that devalues life. However being anti-racist and anti-capitalist doesn’t inherently propose what’s next. And abolishing prison for many folks drops them into a crisis of imagination. Xyrden is an exploration of what our future actually contains. We can seed ourselves with the knowledge heartful people have been gathering about what exists beyond this composting death cult.

We need to reach across and provide a vision. There has to be a vision. And the vision doesn’t have to be perfect – there’s no utopia ultimately. Any world will have it’s shadow but that doesn’t mean we stop. It doesn’t mean it’s not worth reaching for high noon, the least shadow, holding that world, really holding it – inside of us and outside of us, as valid and as a given. 

We render dystopia constantly. We’re on it with the dystopian narratives. There’s so few accessible renderings of utopian vision in this society. There’s Star Trek… tell me where there are postcapitalist futures rendered in pop culture. They are paltry.

I often think about Schrödinger’s cat when I think about folks sitting with all of these dark narratives and our potential futures. To me the proliferation of dystopian fiction reveals a deeply destructive poverty of imagination. Maybe folks do it cause it sells – however that is not adequate justification in a dying world. We have to redirect our imagination and attention if we are to discover what’s next in ourselves.

I hear people like Black Mirror – but to me it’s an epic case of seeing Schrödinger’s cat dead. And I’m interested in keeping Schrödinger’s cat alive. What are the stories where the cat thrives,  and is fully in love with living. Where the cat is living in heaven – not because it died, but because it lives! You feel me. 

Epic. Is there anything you want to ask of the readers here?

I’d ask everyone to be dedicated – not the cult of positivity – but to the crafting of beautiful and detailed utopias for humanity to explore. Our future selves are thanking you. 

Kamra Hakim is a Munsee Lenape territory-based artist, and creator of spaces for underrepresented and marginalized communities through Activation Residency and Activation Cooperative Fund.

Founded in 2018, Activation Residency is a Black & trans-led, immersive healing justice residency. The residency aims to generate safe and collaborative spaces, adapting to its residents’ needs, and creating portals to futures needed now. Activation Cooperative Fund is an experimental, reparations-based funding and investment program, accumulating funds through member contributions, and redistributing them using a cooperative decision-making process. 

We talk to Kamra about their path to the cooperative space, collective approaches around running an artist residency, collective healing and conflict resolution, and dreaming the future of Activation Residency in tandem with their new land design project, Farming Futurity. 

Hi Kamra! Tell us about your personal background and interests, and how they influenced your work.

I was born to two Black Muslims in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where I lived until I was 8 years old. We relocated to Arizona which is where I spent most of my life. My early years revolved around spending lots of time outdoors, riding my bike, having fun, doing my own thing, being like a little boy basically. And then throughout the years my mom had 5 other kids! So I spent so much of my life being a big sibling and taking care of little ones. 

In high school, I had access to more activities. I was very active and tapped into a sense of leadership very early on in my life. I did everything – I was on a dance team, basketball team, I was the president of the student council… After high school, I felt like college was my only option, continuing my education and finding a solid footing as a human being outside of my parents house. I completed undergrad at Arizona School University with a BA in Global Studies. Thanks to my degree, I visited over 15 countries, which helped me develop cultural adaptability and a sense of care for people that aren’t in my immediate periphery.

I also accrued a lot of student loan debt in that time… Every semester I got a loan, I didn’t have any skills around financial planning, and there was not much critical thinking about it. After I graduated, I decided to go to China and teach English. I was feeling adventurous and wanted to do the hard thing. It was one of the most challenging years of my life. Navigating the reality of spending every day with 11 year olds who don’t speak my language and who have never seen a Black person before… I couldn’t really connect with them. 

While I was in China, I was awarded with a foreign affairs fellowship which seeks to streamline minority folks into foreign service. The fellowship included an internship at the State Department, as well as a full scholarship to any masters program of one’s choice. The requirement was to serve for the State Department for 5 years after you graduate. I was accepted to NYU and pursued a master’s in Global Affairs. Halfway through the program I received a call from the State Department saying: “We reviewed your record and found out that you did mushrooms as an undergrad, and you also have a terrible financial track record – so we’re going to revoke your status as a diplomat.”

They took my NYU scholarship and I ended up graduating with $160,000.00 dollars in debt and no job.

Oh my God..

It’s like everything you ever worked for being given to you and then snatched from your fingertips. 

I didn’t have any mental health support at that time, my family was very far away and I wasn’t doing great. I spent the next 2 years just being in limbo and trying to survive, working at bars and doing little side hustles, and really struggling. Until I started visiting different music spaces and arts festivals. I started to see this beautiful coming together of folks that was rooted in community, and building relationships, and care being currency. It really sparked joy in me. These people didn’t come from the same backgrounds but were connecting through their natural talents and capacities in the arts. 

I became friends with a group of musicians, some of the most lovely, caring and community-centered people I have ever met in my life. A year after spending time with them I decided to create my own space for my people and designed by me. 

Soon after, I was asked by a producer at a festival I was working at to “activate the space”. I didn’t know what exactly it meant, but I figured it was about bringing the space to life. So we made handmade vegan treats, we started actively checking in with people… It was a beautiful experience and people felt cared for. From that moment I wanted to run a creative space that makes people feel cared for, and feel like their experience matters. That’s how, in the fall 2018, Activation Residency was born. 

A lot of folks – including us – are trying to re-make the world and there’s so many challenges in that. It’s a bumpy ride but the collective instincts are growing. So gathering these stories and making space for reflection seems like something we should be offering to support these systems of care, as they break and build…

I love that. That’s always been my thing. I’ve been failed by every neoliberal institution I’ve ever been a part of. It’s not like I can count on infrastructure anyways. So Activation it’s not some cute little side project I’m doing – it’s essential for survival. 

That makes sense. Could you tell us about Activation Residency and Activation Coop Fund?

Activation Residency is the programming and the healing justice perspective. Activation Coop Fund is a cooperative. 

When I started I wasn’t aware what co-ops were and why they were important. I joined a cooperative fund in New York run by an artist Emma Hedditch – and it was a really simple process: pay your dues (24 USD per year) and you have access. At that time Activation had no budget, no funding and I had debt from Activation in 2019. I applied for relief funds through that coop fund and ended up getting 1,300 dollars. 

When COVID hit back in March, I decided to build up a co-op fund myself. I did it step by step. The beginning stages included building out the bylaws, the handbook, and a process. I worked on that every day for a month, it was a huge undertaking. Once I had the infrastructure set up and after George Floyd’s murder, Activation Coop Fund really took off. Folks were looking for opportunities to be engaged in something that was low maintenance but high impact. 

Now Activation Cooperative Fund has 90 members, USD 5400 and funded 3 projects already. It’s a beautiful, well built out, scrappy community-based fund that’s easy to use. The membership model goes from 5 dollars per month to 40 dollars per month. Anyone can apply for funds. Folks have applied for funds for e.g. replacing a broken laptop or starter funds for new art project online. 

As a queer person I think it’s very important to have practices that speak to the kind of world I want to live in. I love giving money away and I think it’s very queer. So I started a project in which every Zodiac season I take 25% of all ACF monthly membership contributed funds and give it away to a random Black or Indigenous queer community member on Instagram. It feels great to keep that money flowing. 

That’s beautiful! How’s your team organized, do you make the financial decisions? 

I do all of the admin by myself, I’m the financial administrator, I’m doing the spreadsheets and transfers etc. But there is also four other board members. I try to make their job as easy as possible. In the future, when Activation Cooperative Fund reaches a higher number of members, it will be essential for other board members to step up and take more decisions.

So the fund is a group of people who apply for cooperative membership to have voter access to a pool of donated funds? 

Exactly. 

We’re really curious about how do reparations tie into this? The concept and need for reparations feels very integral to the Activation Fund, it seems like a call for reparations on a mutual aid level. Is this a conversation that’s happening? 

We  talk about reparations all the time. It’s just essential. I’m alive today and can feed myself and pay my rent because of reparations. I don’t plan on working for another neoliberal institution for the rest of my life, so reparations are pretty much essential to keeping me alive. Not being able to afford to live is survival scarcity and nobody should have to live like that. 

It’s not a conversation about how or why or what – I have set up a whole system to make reparations possible, for people who are giving reparations and those who are receiving them. We have had enough roundtables and enough discussions – let’s put this entire thing into practice. In Activation Residency invitations we literally say that reparations are due. 

I’m curious about the process of how decisions are made in the Cooperative Fund. 

ACF use Loomio – I love it soo much! Our co-op fund fiscal sponsor put us onto it. This is where all of our discussions and decisions are taking place. If somebody has a new idea or if they are requesting funds, they do so via Loomio. It’s a very simple process. They describe what the need is, what the ask is, describe the timeline for that. Describe the amount needed. If 25% or 30% of the members vote yes – it’s a yes.  

We were also curious about conflict resolution. Cooperatives have been super influential in your discovery on how to organize. What are the ways of managing and resolving conflict within a cooperative setting?

That’s a great question, I’m really glad you asked. Conflict resolution is something I’ve been focused on in my personal life. I’ve been actively working on this topic with other people of color I’m not really doing it with white people right now. Before I can do conflict resolution with white people, white people need to do their own conflict resolution with themselves. I’m also working on restoring the relationships between people of color and encouraging them to have dialogue between each other. There is so many conversations that need to happen between people of color, around colorism and how harmful it is. 

Last year we had a trauma informed therapist Meenadchi come to Activation, who wrote a book called Decolonising Non-Violent Communivation. As a Black person, facilitator and community member it was the first time that I had come in contact with conflict resolution that didn’t feel punitive and wasn’t centered in whiteness. This version of conflict resolution is really focused on the body and the nervous system. To me that feels more accessible than trying to use tactics around communication that don’t take the body into account. 

My strategy for conflict resolution has been getting really clear what my access needs are, my boundaries and my expectations for entering the space, and requiring that from other community members, so we can meet each at the table already having already addressed the things that we need to prevent conflict coming up. And then, when it comes up, we feel equipped to deal, because we already had these preliminary discussions. 

Another thing that happens at each Activation are “access check-ins”. Before the Residency program kicks off, we gather in a circle and check in about access, what our needs are, how we like to be communicated with, and what we are going through. That way we already have a deeper sense of the landscape of where each person is at, and we can better approach them in a way that is going to facilitate nourishing interactions, rather than interactions that are tense and destabilizing. 

What is an access check in? 

It can look like anything. At Activation it looks like folks gathering in a circle and one by one announcing who they are and communicating what they need. So for example, if I was participating I’d say: “Hey, I’m Kamra. I use they/them pronouns. I typically feel best when I experience space in xyz ways, I appreciate direct communication. Right now I’m struggling with xyz and might need support in abc ways”. 

Very cool. We wanted to ask you about the collective agreements and how they were established and derived. We were very inspired by the entire list!

Thank you! AR has invitations, not agreements. Agreements require consensus and we cannot assume everyone will be in consensus at every moment. Until last year they were not  written out and we got called in by one of our artists who said – you need to write them down, to keep each other accountable. For me, it was very important to have invitations that are fluid and also talk about how we move through our day to day experience, not limited to the space. 

We were inspired by some of the local groups in NYC that we follow like BUFU and Yellow Jackets, as well as movers and shakers that we look up to, like Carolyn Lazard  who put together this beautiful resource guide on how to make community spaces more accessible. 

So there is  definitely a lot of adaptation and sourcing from groups that Activation admires, but we also centered around the things we need in a framework in which we feel safe.

Your website talks about redistributing creative access from elitist structures to marginalized artists and communities. Can you talk about some results and outcomes of this mission? 

That piece comes from the fact that prior to Activation I was exposed to artists and musicians who were famous and had a lot of access. Through building our relationships I decided to redistribute some of this access to artists who were more marginalized. I did that by using my friends’ privilege and asking them questions, and asking them to step up and help me make this experience a reality. I asked them whether they knew any spaces in upstate New York. They put me in touch with Outlier Inn, a beautiful 12 acre property in Woodridge, NY. Most of the artists I advocate for and work with never had an opportunity to do an artist residency, let alone at one at a luxury space. It was very cool to have artists on the periphery come to the residency and meet some other artists who have toured the world, played on the same stages as some of the bands all of us know, and put these two worlds together. 

Does Activation have a physical location? 

Activation in 2018 and 2019 were both in person IRL residency experiences. The first year there were 20 artists, and in the second year there were 60, which was a huge jump and a huge learning curve – a lot of mistakes were made. This year launched Activation Cooperative Fund, Activation Residency Respite as Resistance, and Activation Residency Farming Futurity were launched. Activation Coop Fund is accessible to anyone and anywhere in the world can be a part of it, online. Activation Respite as Resistance  is a program that I designed right after George Floyd’s murder, because I was seeing the absence of care from the movement work. And I can bear witness to the fact that I truly and firmly believe that care is the revolution, and in order to see a new world we have to build it. To me, it looks a lot like turning away from society as we know it and turning to my community and figuring out what our needs are – and actualizing that. Respite as Resistance is going to be an in person experience for frontliners who are fighting the good fight from home, or in the streets, for those folks in our community who are filling community fridges, going to protest, doing jail support, raising money for bail, and haven’t had a break. I think my work in the revolution is showing people that as much as we should be fighting against those in power, we also should be tending to ourselves. 

We were really curious about Farming Futurity, and what that means?

Activation Residency Farming Futurity is Activation Residency’s attempt at active liberation and emergence. Futurity Artist believes a new world is not only possible, but already here. Farming Futurity is a plot of land in the South Catskills of Upstate, New York made up of an artist residency, experimental healing space, and permaculture farm hosting short term residencies for community members eager to explore transformative justice healing arts as a liberatory tool. 

While the Outlier Inn is beautiful, it’s owned by a white person who has been paid over 30,000 USD since Activation has started, and this is money that could have gone to Black and brown people. So I’m really inspired to reclaim the means of production in every way possible, that’s why a permaculture farm is very important to me. I really hate going to the grocery store, I just want to wake up every day and pick vegetables from the garden. 

We’re really curious about the terms “futurity” in particular, and what that term means? 

I’ve been using “futurity” as a portal to call in what is not yet here. I call myself a @futurityartist, that’s my handle on Instagram. I see my human experience and my body as a portal to the future. And that reminds me every day to take the necessary steps to get to my active liberation. 

There’s something really magical about dreaming the future in the face of enormous oppression. And we’re curious whether you have any stories about that? What materialized from this dreaming practice? And what is your practice – if you have one? 

During Activation Year 1 I was standing in the field… and it’s such a beautiful place, it changes throughout the day. In the morning it’s very dewy and quiet and in the afternoon it becomes a little more sunny and vibrant, and at night the streamlights come on, the Dome lights up in very pretty colours. 

I was standing in the middle of the field. There was a sense that something exciting was going to happen. There’s a pond off to my left and the Dome is off to my right. To my right periphery there was fire with artists hanging around it. I remember taking a step back and taking this whole vision in and realizing that – six months ago this whole moment was in my head and now I’m in it. It was a whole meta experience of having a visualisation and then having an inverse of that visualisation and being in that visualisation. It was a whole experience. This was me going through a process of dreaming.

I think it sometimes feels a lot less accessible than it is. I talk about it a lot with friends who dream and we always remind each other to write things down, write down exactly what we want to happen. 

Another powerful story about dreaming things into being happened when I first decided to do Farming Futurity I wrote up a whole narrative around it. And in that narrative I said something along the lines of going to get an old pickup truck and drive up and down and around the country until I found land and the land says “you’re home”. An artist in Detroit reached out to me and said that he had to get rid of his beloved ‘89 Toyota pickup truck and if I wanted it. So I drove to Detroit and got this truck. And now I have a truck because I did a narrative visualisation about needing a truck to make this vision happen. 

So it’s just about speaking things into existence. It’s being really raw and real with the Universe about what your needs are and not being afraid of your capacity to let that abundance flow. I also developed a really strong abundance practice – I started doing Deepak Chopra’s 21 Days Abundance Meditation. And one of the rituals in that meditation was to write on the back of all receipts: “All invested is good and multiplies seven times”. So I have thousands of receipts that say that and I really felt the abundance of that specific meditation flow into my life, both through my work for Activation but also in my personal finances. For me it’s been about getting really specific about what my needs are, and applying practices around getting those needs met. 

What does community empowerment and community healing mean to you? 

At Activation healing happens in a programmatic fashion. For example, last year there was a a breath workshop, and I was really surprised by people’s response. It was very wild to see people have those open experiences around breathing. We also had somatic workshops and invited the Nap Ministry to do a napping workshop. 

The thing about healing is that it’s not linear and it doesn’t happen in the same way for everyone. This modality is about co-creating healing experiences without replicating to healer-client binary. Every person is the master of their body and their experience and knows what kind of healing they need.Care cannot be prescribed.  People need to decide what kind of care they want to receive. 

Do you feel ties to other movements and spaces happening around the world? What other activist spaces are inspiring you within and beyond America? 

People have always had to remake the world under extraordinary circumstances and the local has always informed the global. I personally interacted with another BIPOC-focused co-op in London. We were in conversations about a book called Collective Courage which takes you through the history and lineages of coop funds, particularly started and operated for and by Black people. 

More recently in New York, I feel like mobilisation around mutual aid is very rapid. While I haven’t been in direct communications with local communities doing jail support, I took part in online discussions around accountability processes happening in those communities. Around New York organizing in general there’s been a lot of online discussions taking place, which feels very nice and accessible, especially now that connecting in person in large groups in public spaces just doesn’t feel safe. In terms of the devastation of Beirut it was very beautiful to see folks mobilize to send relief. That was also an inspiration to us to move some of our money to relief as well. 

It’s been nice to be plugged in online and be able to access information around how to support abroad and also how to receive support. AR has  gotten contributions and investments from folks in London, Dubai, all over… It makes me feel that borders are not real and folks will always make a way out of no way. 

You said that care is currency. Can you give us a sense of what you mean by that? 

Care is a currency because currency is a tool that allows us to get our needs met. And I see care as a currency because there’s been moments where I didn’t have money to feed myself and a friend would invite me over for dinner. Care can be the vehicle to get people where they need to be. That’s what I mean. 

Do you feel that there’s a broader politics possible in America right now that is functional? Is there a political vision in your work, is there’s futurity for America more broadly? 

Functional for who? Right now, even though the country is collapsing in so many ways, there’s still people that it’s functioning for. If you’re asking me if I think there’s a futurity in America being able to function for someone like me, a Black trans person who comes from a Muslim family, who also has experienced extreme poverty and violence – on a community level, yes, on a political level – not so sure. I really do think that the political system in America will become obsolete.

That’s a hard question though.. I don’t necessarily want to be in community with Kamala Harris. It’s really hard to want to make a way with folks who literally profit off the debt of people like me. I don’t necessarily have any skin in the game in terms of caring for the American Project. I have seen people over and over again create new worlds that exist outside of needing to have any interaction with the state, and if the state is not going to abolish prisons, then I have no interest in being a part of that. 

What are the things that have come out of your collective, what other dreams have come into fruition? 

In the periphery of Brooklyn organizing that I’m aware of, I see a lot of people doing things in the same space. I think that Activation Residency inspires the sense of possibility in other people who see the work. It’s like a ripple effect. It’s really beautiful to see folks requesting care and getting their needs met, and the state doesn’t have anything to do with it. 

How can people best get involved in Activation’s work, both locally and remotely? And how can they invest? 

AR provides services and content people need and care about. Folks can get involved by engaging products and thus, their own transformation. Invest via Venmo @Activation, Cash App $ActivationResidency, PayPal info@activationresidency.com, or NYFA fiscal sponsorship. 

Thank you for this inspiring interview!

MagentaCeiba is the Executive Creative Officer of Bloom Network, a global community of regenerative culture leaders that gather online and in-person to collaboratively envision a brighter future. Magenta is also a classical pianist and calls herself an imagination healer, trying to help people change their reality where imagination is suppressed by a hierarchical distribution of power, focusing instead on creating alternative societies, business networks, and creative communities in harmonious relationship with the Earth. In this interview we talk about how Bloom Network fosters and scales regenerative culture practices and solutions globally.

Bloom Network is a global community of regenerative culture leaders. Could you explain what “regenerative culture” means?

I usually describe regenerative culture as the opposite of extractive industry. Instead of taking more resources than you are putting back in, you are creating the conditions for more life and more diversity to emerge. The concept of sustainability — where you are putting back as many resources as you’re pulling out — is somewhere in the middle on this spectrum. With regenerative culture and regenerative systems you are making conditions for robust life to thrive — other than fixing things when they are really broken. This occurs through community-oriented life and nourishing practices, whether that’s agriculture, arts, alternative preventative health practices etc. One of our goals is to embed regenerative practices into work life and company structures. Moreover, a lot of indigenous cultures are regenerative cultures — as they operate in a healthy way and in harmonious balance with the flow of nature. This is a thing to be aware of when talking about regenerative cultures — is that they have been with us for thousands of years, they refer to ancient guiding wisdom.

What is an “act of regeneration” the Bloom Network refers to, and what are the examples of those acts?

Bloom is currently in the process of formalizing and tracking that. An example would be planting a tree, or planting a community food forest, or going to a training on restorative justice, resolving conflicts in ways that don’t involve putting someone in prison — restoring healthy relationships for the person who committed the crime and everyone affected instead, contributing to local food sovereignty, to more equitable justice situations. Imagine the preventative health example — planting a garden in your backyard with healing plants, and learning how to do herbalism for boosting immune systems. There are tens of thousands of those sorts of practices and millions of people doing this all over the world — we could talk about these types of regenerative justice practices forever. They just aren’t visible in mainstream media and platforms, and social networks are not really geared towards collaboration and action focused issues — although people are ready to do now, what needs to be done.

Tell us a bit about your background and role at Bloom Network.
My experience with community organizing and regenerative culture started with training at an organization called Radical Women, a socialist feminist grassroots activist organization in the U.S. Radical Women prioritizes fighting for the needs and leadership of the most oppressed, with a special focus on queer women of colour, encouraging them to bring their voices on leadership forward — which are unique and important, because of the multi-layered nature of their experience, their perception of how systems are working and causing harm.

On top of that, I got into healing practices when I went to Burning Man for the first time, where I learned about psychedelics and their role in healing, and I came across a network of meetups called Evolver Spores, where people were integrating their psychedelic insights into social transformation.I was looking for awareness of where the systems are broken, what needs to transform for us all to be healthy, well and create equitable societies, and finding the healing tools to move through some of the intergenerational trauma that I believe all of us are carrying through the passage of time and evolution of humanity.

Evolver at the time was something that brought activism and healing together, organizing meetups jumping around all kinds of different topics — from conflict resolution tools, to solidarity economy, to backyard composting. I started meeting people with really amazing project ideas but they didn’t necessarily have the business skills to pull them off. They weren’t the kind of people who would go get an MBA, and the businesses they were developing were not the traditional, single issue causes — they were instead working on systems-oriented problems, with somewhat more complex objectives that had to be realized within communities. That’s how I got pulled into organizing from my training with Radical Women — bringing these people into the same room together, starting dialogues and sharing skills and resources, so that we could move forward together.

From there I got involved in local organizing with Evolver — but the organization ran into pretty extreme leadership problems resulting from having a traditional hierarchical management structure but ultimately trying to run a peer to peer social network. The local organizers around the world were voiceless in the context of the power structure of the entire organization. We had to separate from that company.

Why do you think the organization ran into these problems?

This is one of the classic problems that, I believe, decentralised tools are built to prevent — abuses of power and resources, situations where a few people can make decisions that negatively impact the work and well-being of all the other stakeholders. That was the reason why we are really excited to adopt the decentralised tools and run our governance in a decentralised manner. With Bloom, we are in the process of designing a new, peer-to-peer leadership structure, and a financial model which is led by local leaders on the ground. Those local leaders are helping to network together different projects in our communities, focused on issues such as local food sovereignty, restorative justice, as well as environmental, social and health restoration projects. The goal is to build a fabric of solidarity economies that can work between the siloed institutional structures, to enable the flourishing of these community solutions for healthy, ecological relationships.

How do these communities benefit from being part of Bloom Network?

People can start local chapters, and we give them templates and tools for this — for example, how to run a meetup, a film screening, a potluck, and so on. We have tightened up the leadership gatekeeping a bit, so that we can trust the people who are building communities in this network, and the bonds won’t get broken over time. We ask people to produce 3 events before they start formally organizing as a Bloom chapter. We have a peer to peer structure which involves a monthly call with all the organizers around the world to share what they are doing and determine how to help each other. We are really looking forward to the decentralised web for the right tools to help our communities in these efforts.

How is Bloom Network formally organized?

Functionally, we are an international cooperative. Legally, we are a public benefit nonprofit corporation. We want to set up a DAO-like organization, as it seems like the only way to run an international cooperative, in terms of taking members donations and allocating them across international borders easily. It seems like it’s going to generate much less administrative overhead to run it that way.

How big is the organization and how many people are involved in the network?

There’s a core team of 3 people regularly working together, pushing things forward, 12 people involved in specific projects — like our conference or innovation lab — and about 7 advisors. We have 12 active local chapters with 1 to 6 organizers each. Overall, there’s around 6,000 people in communication with us, locally or internationally — in Mexico, Costa Rica, Canada, United States, Australia, New Zealand, and volunteers in the UK, Sweden and Italy.

Are these communities volunteer-based?

They are currently mostly volunteer-based, and we are working on fundraising to get our membership model very streamlined, so that it’d be easy for people to start local events. A percentage of the membership fees would go directly to a local chapter to organize. It’d be up to the local chapter to decide what to do, which existing organizations to funnel the funding to. Most of our local chapters work collaboratively by connecting various groups and networks that already exist in their region; given that these groups tend to be underfunded and invisible, it makes sense for them to work together performing regenerative work on the ground. Often, these groups’ communications don’t parse to the larger audience — they have overly niche vocabularies or political viewpoints, and their aesthetics don’t really translate to the wider base of people who are ready to participate. They do very much grassroots organizing, or are a tiny team that doesn’t have the bandwidth to hire marketing or communications people. Our role in the ecosystem is to bring more visibility to those groups and let people know that this work is happening and is something that they can participate in. Through a local Bloom chapter, relationships are born in a very organic way, community leaders get to know each other while working on projects, where they need very little mediation. The formalization of that structure through governance and financial setup that we are planning for 2020 will just help more resources circulate — more people finding out about these opportunities and volunteering. We want to make it easier for people to quickly mobilize.

Is there any way you measure impact of Bloom as an organization or local chapters themselves?

We are tracking basic things, for example how many people come to the events, how many actions are performed, as well as softer tracking of network connections and value exchanges happening. We are also in conversations with Myra Jackson from the UN who helps local grassroots communities to connect with the UN Sustainable Development Goals and adapt how they’re being measured. The way local communities track impact is a little softer and different than how a data scientist would track impact. My favorite metrics framework is from MetaIntegral, I highly recommend checking it out. Other metrics of success for Bloom are job growth in regenerative enterprises, and redistributing wealth to bioregional leadership networks. For local Blooms it varies by what they choose to focus on — for example the Costa Rica chapter has been resuscitating the local scarlet macaw population.

Do you have a set of best practices regarding engaging with various stakeholders?

We are modeled on how mycelium (mushrooms) work in nature. One of our values is to transfer information and resources across different sections of society. A lot of our local organizers work in state or city government, and a lot of projects they are involved in are focused on policy. Bloom’s working teams have been drafting a partner engagement policy to support our stakeholders in evolving toward deeper regenerativity together.

One of the problems we see is the disconnection between the different sectors and stakeholders. I’ve been talking to the people from the UN about this hurdle in terms of collaboration and financing — you have the structures of governments financing projects, the private sector and corporations and their incentives for doing good, and then you have the non-profit world, and the grassroots sector who, in terms of a lot of regenerative and hyperlocal solutions, is completely disenfranchised from the entire system, for many different reasons.

Through our local events and building an online platform, we give spaces to people to share internationally, across institutional boundaries. The purpose of Pollination Labs, Bloom’s innovation consultancy based on regenerative design, is to go directly inside the institutions to help the regenerative transformation happen, in communication with grassroots networks. To be able to navigate through this we all need to be working together. How do we get those pieces of information on how to be more collaborative — it’s going to take us all having a more open world with each other.

What are the example projects that you’re carrying out with Pollination Labs, what companies are you advising?
One of the companies who is asking us to help them is called PlanetOS. They make dashboards for doing large scale business analytics, for example pulling data from climate prediction modelling on a wind farm to understand when they will have higher load on a machine and hence need more repair for example. The data prediction they’re pulling are coming out of many different sources. They are interested in applying that to more contexts and want to work with us to understand what’s happening in other movements. They want to sit down with different movement leaders and industry leaders.

One of the other use cases for Pollination Labs is an economic development consortium for state-level governance. The consortium leaders have a program to transform economic financing and institutional practices to be more regenerative and oriented around social impact, and addressing climate. They want our support with facilitation design and event production logistics.

Those are both relatively complicated use cases but a lot of regenerative work is — a lot of the questions that come to us reflect that the structures that currently exist are not set up to do the kind of complex intermodal stuff we want to do. Who knows how to think like that and implement things that are at that level of complexity and crossing institutional boundaries?

Are those regenerative practices scalable?

Once a pipeline of one product in one company is transformed, we have probably figured out a whole bunch of regenerative practices that are applied to other companies and other people working in the industry. We have designed the structures for people to be able to be coherently connected with each other while working across different contexts and different cities. For example, we know organizers in 5 different countries working on food sovereignty projects and we’ll be able to very easily aggregate the information they need.

Can you share your favourite project example?

I really love what the community in Los Mochis in Mexico is building — a network of 27 ecoparks across the city. The city had allocated these lots to be made into parks and was stalling on building them. Construction companies were coming in and building expensive apartment buildings. The community made a move to block that by self-organizing with 17 other NGOs in the city to create ecoparks instead. There’s a recreation space for sports, there’s a space for arts and they do a lot of teaching on community gardening. The point is to teach people how to grow food in their backyards. They also organize biocultural festivals and bring together people who run a lot of healing businesses and social entrepreneurship. They work with a couple of indigenous groups nearby and listen to their spiritual leadership. It’s a really well designed initiative to help people understand what’s going on in their communities, support their local economies and tap into their local entrepreneurship.

Do you have any reading recommendations for those who want to explore regenerative culture more?

We have a podcast featuring voice of regenerative culture leaders from around the world. Our wiki does have a short amount of entries with have a lot of information. This entry https://bloomnetwork.org/wiki/regenerative-culture-examples/ has readings from each of our seven topic areas which we aggregate around. That will give you a good scope of what we work on within Bloom Network. There’s also a blog post featuring a list of 12 regenerative podcasts to listen to that do anything from climate adaptation, new economy, solidarity economy, peer-to-peer economy, to decolonisation and native rights. One book that I can recommend which is a good introduction is Designing Regenerative Cultures by Daniel Christian Wahl. That’s probably enough to start with!

Thank you!

Nathan Schneider is a journalist and professor of media studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. He was among the first journalists to cover the Occupy Wall Street movement, and more recently he authored the book Everything for Everyone: The Radical Tradition That Is Shaping the Next Economy, in which he looks at how cooperatives can become the basis of a democratic economy. We caught up with Nathan in August in Berlin, asking him to share his views on the existing cooperative model, how can they be modernized and applied in the digital economy. We also talked about the concept and application of decentralization practices in tech, and exchanged ideas on how to increase accountability and leadership in the Web 3.0 space.

Hi Nathan, one of your main research topics is the feasibility of digital cooperatives. Let’s dive deeper into this. 

Nathan Schneider: Yes, that’s a big question for me. Are there ways in which these digital tools can help new cooperatives get off the ground more easily, but also — can they be used by older cooperatives to claim some of their potential? That’s a big ask because those older cooperatives are very conservative, they are careful with their members’ money and struggling to keep up with better capitalized competitors. There is some promise there though — especially, the ability to use things like DAOs [decentralized autonomous organizations] and shared governance technologies to recapture the lateral member-to-member relationship that made cooperatives take off in the first place.

Could you share some of your favourite functioning examples of cooperatives operating nowadays?

There are a few examples that lurk around in the economy. In the US, the most wealthy corner of the cooperative movement is the credit unions, which is also a powerful movement here in Germany. These organizations grew by serving communities that didn’t have access to financial institutions — they were able to do that because they built upon the member-to-member relationship. They built on the idea that people in a neighbourhood could decide on who was creditworthy — better than some banker who never set foot there — based on relationships, based on reputation systems, based on a stake. And as these institutions grew, they received public policy frameworks and regulation to support their growth, and now they operate like a nicer, nonprofit version of banks. About a third of US citizens are members of these institutions, which constitute a powerful piece of infrastructure where people can put their money in a place that feeds their community. But what does the next generation of traditional credit union cooperatives look like? How can we really use this model as a lever to transform the current economic system rather than just work around the edges?

Another example of a contemporary cooperative is Associated Press. Because it’s a cooperative owned by members of various news organizations, it is very much invested in supporting small news outlets because of its membership model. Nobody accuses AP of spreading “fake news” — its cooperative incentive structure results in factual, reliable information. And this is one of the few media organizations that can compare to the reach of Facebook; AP claims to reach half the population of the world every day.

Not everything in the economy needs to be a cooperative, but that cooperatives can play a vital role that can enable other kinds of businesses to function, and to have better feedback loops.

Why don’t more cooperatives operate on a large scale, competing with the big tech giants?

There is nothing about cooperatives that restricts scale other than really financing access. One characteristic of cooperatives too is that when they work at larger scales, they tend to work as federations so they are not claiming the whole market — they are actually just realigning it. While working at a large scale, they actually exist to support the smaller players and the dynamism of the market, rather than to eat up the whole market all onto themselves. And that is a really exciting difference enabling them to support local and diverse business rather than trying to disrupt and consume small players into nonexistence.

Do you have any data on cooperatives operating globally?

The data is very hard to come by. In the US for example we don’t count cooperatives in our censuses — though that is about to change — and data comes from self-reporting. Globally, 10 percent of employment happens through cooperatives, and certain countries have very significant cooperative economies. In Kenya cooperatives generate half of the GDP, in northern Italy significant portions of agricultural and even some industrial activity happens via cooperatives, and in New Zealand — virtually the entire dairy market operates as a co-op. Everyone who’s been around cooperatives for a long time says that we are in an explosive moment and the interest in this model is very high. But the barriers are also very high, as the online co-op structures that people are trying to create are not yet supported by the economy and the legal frameworks. We are in the process of trying to build the ecosystem to enable appropriate financing for cooperatives in the digital economy.

Are cooperatives a viable alternative to the dominant corporate models?

There’s a perception out there that venture backed companies are more efficient and that’s why they get funding, while cooperatives don’t. But the VC model only became possible when legal constraints on it were lifted. Similarly, co-ops have been able to scale in various sectors when appropriate legal frameworks were put in place; thus, there’s a $128 billion co-op bank in my area in Colorado, and there are co-ops in the United States that own nuclear power plants. If we as a society want to make co-ops more of the dominant economy, we can — we just need to make sure they have the tools and rules in place that they need, like any other kind of business.

What’s the difference between old cooperative models and the most contemporary ones that you explored?

A few years ago I reported on the Catalan Integral Cooperative, a remarkable young cooperative based in Barcelona that is involved in various projects, from farms and a reclaimed factory to urban housing and health care. I thought they must be inspired by the Mondragon Corporation, a massive worker co-op in nearby Basque Country. But they told me no — they didn’t want jobs. Their whole purpose is to get out of this idea that you have to have a job your whole life. Their purpose is to liberate people from capitalism and from the economy, not to just to establish themselves within the industrial order. Catalan Integral Cooperative’s objective is to generate a self-managed, post-capitalist society based on peer-to-peer principles. While there are certainly lessons to be drawn from the older cooperative models, such as Mondragon, the CIC example shows that they are also ways in which modern cooperatives are trying to solve different problems, and have different visions for what they’re trying to achieve.

Is it possible to register a transnational digital cooperative today?

It is, but sometimes we need to bend the rules in order to achieve the things that are commonplace in our online economy. That’s one of the opportunities that the blockchain space represents — offering us a new toolset that we can use to explore and develop what it means to be a cooperative member in the new context.

Through your research in cooperatives, have you come across what is the best jurisdiction to establish your legal entity if you want to create an international worker cooperative?

I don’t think there is a perfect jurisdiction. But for example right now in Colorado, where I live, our state happens to have really flexible cooperative laws which allows for forming multi-stakeholder cooperatives. So Colorado is becoming, as our lawyers say, the Delaware of cooperatives. There’s also an EU-wide Statute for a European Cooperative Society, which aims to help cooperatives who have activities in more than one EU country. You can always work with statutes, and they’re not that hard to change, especially locally. The real challenge is creating an economic market around these businesses that knows how to invest in them and how to help them grow.

From the consumer or user perspective, what would this new cooperative-based economy change?

My hope is that this kind of model could shift some of the accountability problems we currently face, across the spectrum. A new feedback loop of accountability would be introduced and, for instance, tech companies would lose interest in exploiting their users because the users would now be the legitimate business owners. We would have to build a model that is oriented very differently from the outset. Moreover, we would have to create frameworks where, as a society, we have a say in the institutions that we depend on, and where we own our problems — rather than just saying “oh, those evil corporations, they’re causing all these problems.”

We also need to be aware — and this has been recognized in the blockchain space — that just because an organization is decentralized, it doesn’t mean the problems go away. It just means you have a different framework for addressing those problems. And to me, that is the hope.

Do you see blockchain as a really disruptive technology which can make a real difference? What is the hope it brings, and what are the main challenges, in your opinion?

I first learned about the Ethereum whitepaper early in 2014, when I was touring with my book on Occupy Wall Street. I experienced this protest movement as being full of people craving a pure, more accountable, responsive kind of democracy. Ethereum really caught my attention because it represents something where we can actually start trying those new kinds of democracies that people were craving in the protest camps all around the world. It provides a space where we can iterate on governance fast, and where we can develop new, responsive forms of democracy which are both efficient and accountable.

Since then, it feels less like a moment where we are craving for democracy — it feels like the whole idea of democracy is in a massive crisis. And if we don’t sort out some real accountable institutions fast — democracy is going away. So I’ve been excited about the really creative mechanism designs fluctuating in the decentralization space. I want to bring them back to those old co-ops. At the same time, I think there is too much faith in that one mechanism will solve all of our problems. There’s maturity coming into play now where people are recognizing it might be a little more complicated than that. But the truth is, the blockchain space enables tremendous creativity going into what the future of accountability could look like. There’s also a potential to learn a lot of lessons from what came before and apply them in new ways.

The kind of voting systems we have now in democratic governments, for instance, are just so poor at accounting for and balancing preferences. And there is a potential for tremendous innovation in the DAO space. But there are also forgotten lessons to be learned from offline governance. Sortition, for instance, is the selection of political officials as a random sample from a larger pool of candidates. It is a system intended to ensure that all competent and interested parties have an equal chance of holding public roles. It was very prominent in the Athenian democracy, for example — but is much less prominent now. And actually it’s a system that has a lot of really nice features, it’s a way of balancing expertise and populism — but it is going to be very hard to implement that in our governments now. In the blockchain space, however, we could try out 15 different kinds of sortition systems and see how they work.

As we play with all these different kinds of fun mechanisms, we can’t forget that there’s a lot more to governance than voting. And the point of good governance is that it fades into the background. When it’s working well, democracy consumes less of our attention, not more.

In your recent article on decentralization you mentioned tools that are meant to decentralize issues and introduce novel possibilities run the risk of enabling astonishingly unaccountable concentrations of power. Can you give some examples of that?

First of all, I’m not sure that just more decentralization per se is going to solve any problems. When we look at past systems, it appeared necessary to establish forms of centralization that protect the kinds of decentralization we like. One example is protecting competitive labor markets by having labor laws that are centralized and centrally enforced, or protecting decentralized business markets by having centralized antitrust law, which ensures that when a company takes too much market power, it faces consequences. I don’t think we should be afraid of those things. To me, the more useful question rather than whether the new systems are decentralized is — are the systems we are creating more accountable and liberating? The system can be as unconstrained as possible, but in cases when constraints are necessary — those constraints should be accountable. If enough of us think they are really stupid, we can change them. I think the technologies developed in the Web 3.0 space can be useful — if we reframe them around actually advancing a democratic promise and advancing accountability.

What will it take to overtake incumbents such as Google, Facebook, Amazon? Is it even possible to overtake or replace them with more accountable, decentralized solutions?

If we are going to tolerate the role that they currently play, we should get serious about building accountability into them — because exit is not an option. Perhaps certain aspects of these systems are indeed natural monopolies — but if so, they should be either regulated like crazy, or they should be democratically structured, like a school board.

One project I’m interested in now is how can we start inserting some user ownership into these companies? Interestingly, Uber, Lyft and Airbnb have all been begging the Securities and Exchange Commission to let them share ownership with their users. They do want to align their interests with their users. Let’s take advantage of that desire, let’s give users some equity and change the rules around that. But they also have to give users a voice. That seems like a reasonable compromise.

If you were brought into the Ethereum Foundation because someone asks, how can we be made more accountable — what would be your suggestion?

I think first the question is — what powers they actually have? There’s a lot of lack of clarity about that. My understanding is that there’s the official foundation and then there’s a shadow — a tyranny of structurelessness that is also very much at work. So first, I would say that we need to have clarity about what the power structure is — where the buck stops. And then ask — who are stakeholders, who are the citizens?

And then wonder what is appropriate for those citizens to be involved in, and what isn’t? And then ask how do they get involved. For instance, in a technical context for a startup, you don’t want a thousand random people looking over the shoulders of developers, you want to honour expertise.

Can you speak more about your thoughts on leadership in institutions or cooperatives?

It’s important to recognize that you don’t want everybody always involved in everything. Instead, you want to identify the places where accountability really matters, design for those, and then leave the people who are vested with responsibility — the space to use that responsibility. I spend more time with cooperative entrepreneurs lately reminding them that they are leaders, rather than talking about horizontal organizing or decentralization. They assume that because it’s a cooperative they need to defer on everything to the amorphous membership. But cooperatives have always needed leaders. The question is, how is that leadership accountable? Once that’s clear, let’s free those leaders to express their full selves and put their talents to work — that’s what we want. We don’t want to constrain people, we want to empower them.

As we build new kinds of organizations, we also need to dispense with the illusion that we’re departing entirely from the past: just because we’re dealing with crypto ledgers doesn’t mean we don’t need to have institutions anymore or that humans don’t have to trust each other anymore. I think that evidence is very strong from our experience that whenever we try to escape those things, we’re going to end up with stuff that’s worse.

Thank you!

This interview was conducted by Ola Kohut and Yalda Mousavinia in Berlin on 22. August 2019.