The following attempts to distill the shared context we have developed over the last year and a half. The guiding question motivating this work is, “what is it about the confluence of digital technology and global economic circuits that needs to change?”

Economikit emerged in reaction to a debt-creating engine meant to produce capital from capital, in a negative loop reinforcing the system’s self-perpetuation. Our work lives as a set of experiments responding to this situation.

Here we are, in the collapse of American Capitalism, along with the rise of Black Lives Matter and the tide of social awareness in the White world. Movements of consciousness-raising and techno-utopianism become entangled in the promise of Bitcoin, blockchain, and other distributed tech.

But are these technologies anything other than the last gasps of the Western mind to make some “good” of the materialist and separatist mindsets that they’ve become beholden to under Scientism? Can technology ever be generative and sustainable, or does it inherently depend on externalising the suffering of other beings? Is trying to engineer our way out really a valid path forward, or is this all just spiritual bypassing?

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Recently I decided to fly halfway across the world to attend Open2017, a two-day conference on the emerging "Platform Cooperativism" movement. For those unfamiliar with the term, simply think 'online platforms + cooperatives'— or to put it another way, "what if Facebook was owned and goverened by the people who used it?".

My interest in platform co-ops came by way of my interest in crypto-economics, piqued specifically by Ethereum. Prior to that I had no real interest in economics or finance, but when confronted with a system which allowed value to be codified I was suddenly all ears. It seemed humanity had developed a system whereby values (as in real values; individual, social & community values rather than financial ones) could be encoded into economic systems. This could easily be a game-changer, I thought. The future seemed bright and interesting. (more)