The seventh edition of the Institute of Network Cultures’ MoneyLab was in Amsterdam on 14+15 November, 2019. The topic was “Feminist economics, social payments, corporate crime and the ‘blokechain'” with Ana Teixeira Pinto (Faculty Berlin ’16) delving into the xenophobia, and Andrea Fumagalli (Faculty Berlin ’19) speaking on “Payments and the Platforms: Monetization of the Social.”

MoneyLab #7

On feminist economics, social payments, corporate crime and the ‘blokechain’ 

Since 2013, MoneyLab has explored questions around the design of money, the democratization of finance, and the new shifts in fintech. At MoneyLab #7, we’ll be looking beyond the world of libertarian startups with their often masculine preoccupations. From hyperlocal cryptocurrencies at techno festivals to self-organized exchange systems in refugee communities, what are promising design strategies to counter the corporatization of money? Can we imagine a crypto economy that values care work and focuses on equity and solidarity?

The social is being monetized left, right and center. From micropayments to data trading, new money systems are becoming mainstream overnight. What remains of agency in a cashless society? While transactions are becoming digital, personal data ownership slips through users’ hands. What does it mean when a tech giant like Facebook enters the scene with its Libra “currency-for-the-good”? Does the porn industry, once again, lead the way in fintech uptake?

Despite dreams of radical shifts, blockchain fantasies overflow with the same old male biases. Now that the crypto-hype has become mainstream, it is more important than ever to reassert control over the definition of money. What will be the result of the regulatory regimes striving to “civilize” fintech? How do we hijack the competition between established players and new financial elites in markets that are still caught in bubble and burst dynamics?

Since 2013, MoneyLab has explored questions around the design of money, the democratization of finance, and the new shifts in fintech. At MoneyLab #7, we’ll be looking beyond the world of libertarian startups with their often masculine preoccupations. From hyperlocal cryptocurrencies at techno festivals to self-organized exchange systems in refugee communities, what are promising design strategies to counter the corporatization of money? Can we imagine a crypto economy that values care work and focuses on equity and solidarity?

Join us at this home-based 7th edition filled with workshops, performances, screenings and discussions on pressing financial issues. With artists, academics, activists and geeks, we explore what roles art, activism and design can play in expanding the financial ecology of alternatives.

When: 14 + 15 November 2019
Where: Tolhuistuin, Amsterdam

Timetable | Sessions

RECAP:

ANA TEIXEIRO PINTO – BITCOIN AND THE BASILISK

Ana Texeiro Pinto took the techie discussion around Bitcoin, AI, blockchain, and the digital economy to another level. She did not so much question the technologies’ material properties but rather the (gendered) fantasy that led to their creation – and the fantasy that their creation conjures. For the discourse around tech seems always to be in excess of the actual technological possibilities. Our dreams of AI lovers, computer learning, and holiday trips to Mars make present-day cutting-edge technologies look like they’re tools from the Stone Age.

Pinto’s approach to technology is in line with Klaus Theweleit’s analysis of the German Freikorps in his famous Männerphantasien: to understand their origin they should be examined as form (fantasy) rather than function (materiality). When taken as the product, pure ideations beyond any material properties or use value, there is libidinal validity (however grotesque) in these male-dominated personifications. The obsessive focus on technological progress found among transhumanists, effective altruists, and Bay Area techno libertarians can be explained as driven by paranoia, FOMO and the fear of loss of control. In being repressive counter-reactions, tech fantasy testify to a real crisis in male identity.

Pinto took as an example the paranoid yet common fantasy of AI as the future rule who should be obeyed in advance and shows that The Matrix was not its first cultural manifestation. In 1909, Filippo Tomasso Marinetti published his novel Mafarka: The Futurist, in which he propagates ‘the fertilization of the male spirit’. The novel, which is the story of an airplane-shaped, basilisk-like creature called Mafarka and his quest for reproduction without women, shows that the origin of the fantasy of technologically facilitated homoreproduction is male autarky. In the preface to the book, Marinetti states:

In the name of the Human pride that we adore, I tell you that the hour is near when men with broad foreheads and chins of steel will give birth prodigiously, by one effort of flaring will, to giants infallible in action […] I tell you that the mind of man is an unused ovary […] It is we who will be the first to impregnate it.

Pinto unpacked the consequences of this analysis, jumping from Jason to psychoanalysis and finally to Bitcoin, concluding that it is the product of the same male anxieties as Mafarka:

Economically speaking, Bitcoin is the answer to the wrong question: the problems with value fluctuations are not formal but political, they cannot be solved by software engineering […] Bitcoin reflects deep-seated anxieties about “foreign” control of the Federal Reserve, and more broadly, an anti-Semitic creep marked by the putative illegitimacy or unnaturalness of Financial capital. In a nutshell Bitcoin, like Mafarka, is a fantasy about parthenogenic value.

Seeing the current shift of global hegemony, which we might call de-Westernization, it is not surprising that privileged white men in the Valley turn to parables like that of the AI dominator, devoting their lives to the Basilisk. Following what seem to them only way to counteract the otherwise inevitable rise of Asian dominance and save racial capitalism, the tech-savvy geeks gathered tendencies like the alt-right simultaneously embrace neoliberal power, techno-libertarianism, and neo-Fascist attitudes.

Full recap over at INC here.