Economia

Economia

Methods for Reclaiming Economy

In the la cluding evolu test a r ticle tiona r y bio by log is

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Economia Contributors:

Edited by Olga Mink & Wiepko Oosterhuis

Josef Bares Daniel de Bruin Dan E. Burr Paolo Cirio Meredith Degyansky Michael Goodwin Monique Grimord Ilan Katin Thomas Kern Nicholas McGuigan Jennifer Lyn Morone Mark van der Net Brett Scott Timothy Smith UBERMORGEN Pablo Velasco Lenara Verle Geerat Vermeij

Methods for Reclaiming Economy

EDITORIAL NOTE 5 CHAPTER 1 ECONOMY AS A PLAYFUL CONSTRUCT 9 MONIAC – Daniel de Bruin 11 The Art of Financial Hacking – Brett Scott 17 Social Algorithm Art – Paolo Cirio 23 Currencies on the Board – Lenara Verle and Ilan Katin 27 Disrupting the Creative Economy in Art Schools – Timothy Smith 29 CHAPTER 2 ECONOMY AS A BIOLOGICAL CONSTRUCT 35 Blockchain Morphology – Pablo Velasco 37 Red Coin – UBERMORGEN 43 TerraEconomics – Monique Grimord 47 Building a Healthy Economy – Geerat Vermeij 53 CHAPTER 3 ECONOMY AS A SOCIAL CONSTRUCT 77 Creating through Consuming – Josef Bares 79 The Fictional Formality of Capitalism – Meredith Degyansky 87 New-Economic-Model – Jennifer Lyn MoroneTM Inc 95 EGONOMIA – Mark van der Net 99 A Counting for the Language of Modern-day Economic Fictions – Nick McGuigan and Thomas Kern 103 CONTRIBUTOR BIOGRAPHIES 109 NOTES 111 BIBLIOGRAPHY 113 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 122 COLOPHON 123

EDITORIAL NOTE Today’s economic model no longer suits our needs. It’s time we start realising that the economy is not an inevitable law of nature, but something we create ourselves.

Economics has become a specialised field - a dismal science. We trusted the economy to the experts, but found they don’t know which direction is best either. Although the economy is omnipresent in our daily lives, it is often regarded as boring, uninteresting and too complicated.

To get a grip on this subject, we need to explore it more thoroughly and stretch our thoughts about economy and society. What kind of economic thinking fits our 21st century society? Can we find alternative systems that are not based on permanent growth?

In April 2017, Baltan Laboratories held a three-day festival about the economy without the economists. During the festival, we rid ourselves of our preconceptions by embracing a playful and open approach. We invited artists, writers, activists, scientists, biologists, scholars and hackers to present their ideas on how we can shape new economic realities. This publication focuses on a selection of ideas explored during the festival. With an open-ended and kaleidoscopic approach, it features contributions that show how the current model could be reshaped. Be it by promoting the well-being of our planet, exploring the notion of extreme individualism, the development of new value systems or digital technologies shaping society, we believe these ideas, big or small, local or global, real or imagined, have the poten-

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tial to inspire and empower anyone to take an active role in reclaiming the economy.

In the first chapter, ‘Economy as a Playful Construct’, the economy is seen through an artistic eye. This approach treats economics like any other technology or science, playing with it and hacking it. The contributions in this chapter provide methods to better understand the mechanisms underlying economics and describe ways in which the current system could be destabilised.

‘MONIAC’ by artist Daniel de Bruin explores the economic mechanisms of supply and demand, inflation and deflation. His pinball-like machine works as a perpetual mobile, encouraging players to keep spending and consuming. Brett Scott describes the similarities between the artist and the hacker in ‘The Art of Financial Hacking’, proposing hacktivism as a method for the critical exploration of bureaucracy. Conceptual artist Paolo Cirio describes ‘Social Algorithm Art’, a type of art that explores complex social systems, while ‘The Currency Lab Game’ by Lenara Verle and Ilan Katin is an interactive gamification tool that challenges players to build a healthy economic ecosystem of their own invented currencies. Timothy Smith argues for a change in art education that will focus more on the process of creativity rather than on output.

The second chapter provides insights into economics through a biological lens. In the recent past, our economic direction was determined by profit, market value and the accumulation of wealth, believed to be

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achieved through unlimited growth, which had a major impact on the well-being of our planet. In ‘Economy as a Biological Construct’, the mechanisms of the economy are compared with the systems in nature, guiding us to new unforeseen conclusions. ‘Blockchain Morphology’

by Pablo Velasco explains the blockchain as an evolving animal of the digital economy, as strange to us as the radial body of the octopus and the lack of limbs of the sponge. UBERMORGEN’s project ‘Red Coin’ is a video comparing the mining of Bitcoin to the production of red blood cells, criticising the hidden mechanisms of this cryptocurrency by presenting images of Chinese Bitcoin mining farms filtered in blood-red. ‘TerraEconomics’

by Monique Grimord explores ecological thinking and speculative fabulation to challenge our idea of economics.

She creates a new economic reality, with the health of our planet, rather than profit and economic growth, as the ultimate goal. Evolutionary biologist Geerat Vermeij explores whether we can have a healthy economy without growth. In ‘Building a Healthy Economy: Learning from Nature’, Vermeij demonstrates the importance of including other disciplines in the discussion about our economy. We can learn from nature and develop a better, more healthy economy. If we embrace the idea of an economy intrinsically connected to the health of our planet, perhaps we will find alternatives for redefining the idea of growth and the notion of a prosperous economy in the future.

‘Economy as a Social Construct’ discusses the economy as a system with social relationships at its core. Ridding

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economics of its abstract, formal and specialist appearance creates space for a more empathic and humanistic point of view. In ‘Creating through Consuming’, Josef Bares traces the relationship between his private shopping decisions in Hong Kong and the public social impacts the company received that day, such as changes in stock price. The story of Meredith Degyansky portrays the effects of our economy on everyday life and describes many small-scale personal economic realities. Jennifer Lyn Morone presents an economic model revolving around our most intimate and personal possessions; our body and our data. In her project JLMinc, she took the ideas of individualism and capitalism to the extreme by incorporating herself as a business entity. ‘EGONOMIA’

by Mark van der Net is an alternative currency based on personal values and beliefs. In ‘Economic Fictions’, Nick McGuigan and Thomas Kern show how the numerical language used by accountants avoids personal accountability, and argue for new language that creates room for empathy and accountability to be used in business.

We hope this publication offers new insights and inspiration for those interested in rethinking and reshaping our economy. Let this be a starting point for dialogues that step out of our existing frame of thought, enabling many ideas to flourish and co-exist in the future.

Wiepko Oosterhuis & Olga Mink

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CHAPTER 1

Economy as a playful construct

Daniel de Bruin Brett Scott Paolo Cirio Lenara Verle Timothy Smith 9

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DANIEL DE BRUIN

Making the economy work (for you)

MONIAC — A PLAYFUL INTERACTIVE MACHINE ON ECONOMIC MECHANISMS In 1949, William Phillips, an engineer and student at the London School of Economics, created an analogue computer. This machine, the Moniac (Monetary National Income Analogue Computer), simulated the economic processes of the United Kingdom using running water.

The name Moniac may have been suggested by an association of the words ‘money’ and ‘ENIAC’, an early electronic digital computer. The machine was also known as the Phillips Hydraulic Computer and the Financephalograph.

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The MONIAC installation

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Artist and designer Daniel de Bruin made an artistic version of the Moniac in collaboration with Baltan Laboratories. For this, de Bruin did not use an existing economic framework, but started from his own interpretation of our economy. In his own work, titled MONIAC, de Bruin combines several economic mechanisms, such as supply and demand, inflation and deflation. As such, the installation provides a space to play with economics and develop new ideas.

To gain more metal balls, players had the option to play pin-ball.

de Bruin’s MONIAC allows up to five people to use the system simultaneously, earning and spending money, which is visualized by metal balls. Someone must work to start the cash flow by physically setting the machine in motion. To get more money, you can choose to work longer and harder, invest, speculate or gamble. By spending your money, you can purchase and consume candy. But watch out, prices fluctuate! his collaboration between Baltan Laboratories and Daniel de Bruin T was kindly supported by the Mondriaan Fund.

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QUOTES FROM DANIEL “The original Moniac by Bill Philips was the starting point of the whole project. First of all, I tried to understand that machine, and to do that I had to study basic economics. Pretty soon I discovered that economics is the study of human behaviour. I never realised that before. It’s no science, it’s just very complex predictions. So, I started designing a machine through which I could study human behaviour in the same kind of way, making the machine super interactive like the real economy.”

“For me the best responses were the kinds of people interacting with the machine and trying to understand how it works. A kid emptied almost all the candy out of the machine – he’d found a small hack I’d build into the machine that let him earn money really fast. Most adults couldn’t see it, but he did. Next to that, I enjoyed seeing people working together to earn money faster.”

With enough metal balls, players could buy candy!

Masterclass ‘The art of financial hacking’ by Paolo Cirio and Brett Scott at the Economia festival (April 2017). Photo by Diewke van den Heuvel.

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BRETT SCOTT

THE ART OF FINANCIAL HACKING

The financial sector – when viewed from afar – can seem like a desolate, cold and brutal mix of relentless money-making, mathematics and Machiavellian mystery. Increasingly though, adventurous artists, hackers and activists are probing the contours of the sector, using it as raw material for fun and subversive financial hacks. Can you build a hedge fund as a way to infiltrate into the inner workings of the sector, or can you design an algorithm that jams the traditional logic of markets?

What about going undercover, or using the sector as the setting for interactive theatre?

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In April 2017, artist Paolo Cirio and I posed these questions to a group of participants at our Art of Financial Hacking workshop at Economia festival in Eindhoven. Our aim was to take them on a journey into the dark heart of finance, and to help them use the financial sector as a raw material for creative interventions. The participants were adventurous, but instilling this mindset within the broader public is hard. Many people do not believe they have the right or ability to challenge the financial sector, which often appears daunting and impenetrable. We look upon huge skyscrapers and imagine bankers using obscure language, complex mathematical models, and holding secretive meetings behind closed doors, projecting great power and influence. It takes practice to recognise that the sector is in fact far more permeable than it appears, offering many opportunities and cracks for interventions.

We chose the workshop title deliberately. Forget the clichéd media representations of hackers as malicious criminals intent on breaking into your computer. That is like saying ‘artists are people who paint pictures’, a statement that ignores the myriad of ways artistic practice might be manifested. Hacker culture is much deeper and richer than the mere act of breaching computer defence systems.

Furthermore, just as it’s possible for someone to mass-produce fake knock-offs of a Picasso without ever carrying the spirit of an artist, much computer crime carries no traces of the deep spirit of hacking.

To understand deep hacker culture requires us to engage with three intersecting traditions.

BEHIND THE INTERFACE: HACKING AS A CRITICAL EXPLORATION OF BUREAUCRACY Our modern world is dominated by large-scale bureaucracies, operated by insiders and used by outsiders. These bureaucracies are not just governments; they are any large-scale human organisation, from multi-national corporations to mass transportation systems to universities. These institutions dictate to you rules for interaction: if you wish to apply for a licence, do X, Y or Z. If you wish to get a mortgage, fill X form out. If you wish to study here, prove X and Y. If you wish to ride on the train, insert bank card into ticket machine. These rules are often encoded into the interfaces that we interact with, and we learn to use them through experience or user manuals.

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Even the technology we use resembles a bureaucracy. Look at your phone. It has an interface that presents interaction options for you to select. It comes with a shallow user manual, but it does not come with a deep guide to how the phone actually works, who designed it, who really manufactured it, or how you could repair it yourself. It is the end result of an opaque sprawling global supply chain co-ordinated by an enormously powerful corporation enmeshed in a network of banks and investors.

Many people work within one bureaucracy and then interact with many other bureaucracies that they do not work for. Thus, an employee of a large pharmaceutical company leaves work for the day and enters the transport system, or uses their Uber app, or goes into a supermarket, or browses the web on a smartphone; all systems that they shallowly interact with without fully understanding them. They may not even understand the bureaucracy they work for. They arrive back in the morning and have to pass through an office security system, follow distant orders, and never meet other people who work in other departments.

The prevailing power dynamic is one of small-scale individuals interacting with large-scale institutions. This may be an efficient way to co-ordinate large-scale interactions between people who are strangers to each other, but it is also a source of deep alienation, a sense of being a passive outsider observer of the very world you are a part of. It also means that large-scale exploitation can take place without anyone really perceiving it, hidden behind layers of abstraction. Take the financial system, for example. Millions of people interact with banks every day, but only a tiny percentage actually understand the inner workings of banks, or recognise the distant consequences of investments they are party to.

Even bank employees do not necessarily understand the inner workings.

So how does all this relate to hacker culture? A major foundation of hacker culture lies in the attempt to assert individual agency and creativity in the face of such structures. It is the desire to get behind the interfaces and to subversively explore the deeper hidden wiring of the systems we have to use, and to feel confident in traversing them.

This exploration process can take place at different scales. In the case of technology, it may involve taking your phone apart to see how the parts interact. It may involve investigating the inner world of the particular corporation that constructed the phone. It may involve exploring the economic sub-system that the corporation is part of, the investors, banks and suppliers that plug into it. It can involve exploring the multi-national legal structures and international trade system that it is nested within,

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the workings of the international payments system and logistics supply chains, and the hidden pools of labour in factories in faraway places.

BREAKING BINARIES: HACKING AS SUBVERSIVE DEVIANCE The desire to explore beneath the surface of an alienating system is one foundation of hacker culture, but a second powerful hacker tradition involves contesting power structures once they are uncovered.

Traditional activists often attack a system head-on, standing in front of a powerful institution and raising their fists, blocking and resisting. The hacker impulse – which is an ancient historical impulse that existed far before the word ‘hacker’ was coined – takes a more oblique stance. Rather than facing a system head-on, the hacker instinct is to work partly with the grain of a system to bend it, distort it, divert it, warp it and destabilise its traditional boundaries.

The last point is important. The traditional activist often accepts the boundaries set by a system – you are the banker, and I am the Occupy protestor who is not a banker – but a hacker approach might seek to liquefy the boundaries and play with them: We are activists who run a hedge fund. I am a banker that is leaking information about my company’s dubious activities. We are shareholder activists that use the legal rights of owning shares to disrupt the normal workings of a corporation. All these examples either show the ‘incorrect’ use of a financial structure or instrument, or they show a person who is both insider and outsider, hovering between the traditional boundaries.

This is not to suggest that traditional activism isn’t effective.

Straightforward activism can be much better at mobilising collective action that can bring about real change. If, however, you’re an individual with limited resources and a mischievous edge, looking to disrupt a system without overtly placing yourself in the direct line of fire, the hacker archetype might suit you.

This still leaves a lot of room for variation, and hacking might best be described as a spectrum of activities that synthesise the ‘fuck you’ impulse of activists with the creative ‘we can do this’ attitude of entrepreneurs, mixing them with different levels of intensity. Merely seeking to disrupt something is just rebellion, and merely seeking to innovate can be uncritical, apolitical and shallow. True hacks often blend both

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these impulses. This can manifest in the desire to explore the rules and design of a system, in the desire to jam and mess with those rules, and in the desire to rewire those rules. It runs the gamut from tinkering with DIY electronics through to large-scale political hacking of corporations and governments.

It is at this point that we can begin to see the intersection of hacking with art. Artistic practice often involves appropriating content from large-scale systems and representing it, mixing it, questioning it, taking it into unusual contexts, hybridising it and destabilising it. Artists, like hackers, often seek to approach topics obliquely. They seldom wish to produce the straight political messages that are required by a straight activist movement. They wish to bring to light the unseen angles and hidden properties of systems. There is a resonance between the artistic impulse and the hacker impulse, and they can blend into each other.

While the official ‘high art world’ may be obscure and self-referential, subject to market forces and institutional inertia itself, the deep impulse of authentic artists transcends the stuffy strictures of high art.

Likewise, while huge institutions such as Google have attempted to co-opt and gentrify hacker culture, the hacker ethic lives on outside it.

HACKTIVISM: HACKING IN THE CONTEXT OF THE INTERNET The final complexity involves integrating the concept of ‘hacktivism’.

Hacking in general can take place in any context, from a piece of technology to a transport system to a corporate conference, but ‘hacktivism’ is very explicitly situated in the context of the Internet, the fusion of computer hardware and software with telecommunication systems. Many of the stereotypical presentations of hackers, such as Anonymous and Wikileaks, come from this context. The system being challenged in this case is either the Internet infrastructure, or those who control it, or those who use it to control others. It can involve using the Internet to discover and disseminate secrets about large companies. It can involve pushing for transparency of huge institutions that invade the privacy of individuals whilst cloaking themselves in secrecy.

In this context, hacking intersects with the world of crypto-anarchists, cypherpunks and other internet activist movements that operate under the mantra of privacy for the vulnerable, transparency for the powerful.

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Diagram art commodities

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PAOLO CIRIO

SOCIAL ALGORITHM ART 2011 – 2014

The act of processing, wiring and steering information is pure raw power. It concerns the creation of reality. The Social Algorithm Art sketches, sculpts, and performs this information flow; therefore, it programs reality.

The artist outlines the algorithm that moulds information structures and executes information processing.

The diagrams of Social Algorithms are blueprints for social software launched into the operating system of our society. They illustrate, design and imagine the circuited tasks of the applications that run the frameworks of social order.

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Social Algorithms want to bring about progress. They propose creative social systems through a set of instructions to be followed step by step. They are propositions of how to create social progress akin to algorithms for efficiency, speed, openness and the impact of their outcomes.

Social Algorithm Art takes the form of drawings, sculptures and performances. These media become active agents. Since the algoDiagram culture

rithms of the artworks have agendas, they are able to influence social reality, or can be potentials to be explored conceptually.

The drawings of Social Algorithms visualise templates for activating, making, revealing and challenging social structures by intervening in the flow of power dynamics. Anyone can re-create and re-enact these social forms and interventions by following the flowcharts of the Social Algorithms drawn by the artist.

Diagram economy

The performances of Social Algorithms confront their public with creative scripts, actions and configurations for participation.

Performances activate social forms directly by altering the public’s engagement, belief, and perception. The audience is involved according to the scores of the artist’s algorithms that orchestrate the flow of social interactions.

The sculptures of Social Algorithms cast information that gives other forms and meanings to power structures. The construction of society is built of compositions, arrangements and formations of knowledge. Social forms take shape by the Social Algorithms’ purposeful assembling of information, according to the artist’s models.

Social Algorithm Art reflects on the power of algorithms as the main materials and agents in the creation, control and perception of cultural, political and economic realities. Social Algorithm Art aims to examine, inspire and affect society as a whole through the making of creative algorithms.

Reality should be re-processed, re-programmed and re-organised, as society always needs improved algorithms. In doing so, Social Algorithm Art propels the aesthetics of the making and unmaking of social systems.

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LENARA VERLE

Currencies on the board:

PLAY THE HAND OF THE CURRENCY DESIGNER

The Currency Lab game takes place in a world where only one type of currency dominates, and this is causing many problems. To fight back, the people in this world took it upon themselves to create several complementary currencies in an attempt to solve some of these problems and build an economical ecosystem much stronger and healthier than before.

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We wanted to create an engaging and fun way to learn about alternative currencies. The Currency Lab game is inspired by real challenges faced by contemporary and historical currencies. Each player is a currency designer and must devise their own creative strategies to overcome several challenges; what if the government wants to declare your currency illegal, or it suddenly becomes devalued?

The game’s focus is on the interaction and discussion among players, and the rules are tailored to encourage this. It is designed to reward collaboration as well as competition, just as we humans evolved to do.

If you help another player, your currency advances as well. The path for successfully designing and implementing a currency is not clear; thus, the game board does not feature a single path or a clear direction to move. Feel free to advance as you wish.

In this publication, you will find the board with the rules, plus the cards, pawns and dice to cut out and use to play. This is a simplified (but not less fun) version of the game, designed to accompany this Economia publication. The full version includes more advanced levels of difficulty and, after successfully tackling more difficult challenges, players are rewarded by gaining experience and extra strategies.

The game has a companion booklet with examples of contemporary and historical currencies. It is especially useful if you are not familiar with alternative currencies, and even if you are, some of its many examples might be new to you. You can download it at WWW.COINSPIRATION.ORG/GAME/FACTBOOK . For those curious about the full game, it is available at WWW.COINSPIRATION.ORG/GAME as a free download.

ENJOY!

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TIMOTHY SMITH

DISRUPTING THE CREATIVE ECONOMY IN ART SCHOOLS

In this essay I will explore the influence of the creative economy on university-level art education and art schools. Discourses on the creative economy measure creativity in capitalist terms; that is, that creativity can be identifiable and classifiable in terms of units of capital. In this sense, it is approached as a marketable commodity that is timely and based on the perception of what creativity is, and not what creativity could become.

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I contend that the mentality of the creative economy stifles creativity in artmaking practices by producing conditions that make artist-students inherently non-creative. I will turn to Gilles Deleuze’s use of the French term expérience to discuss a notion of creativity that promotes failure and the cultivation of problems, which paradoxically disrupts the influence of the creative economy and embraces life-affirming creative endeavour in art schools.

To begin with a ‘foundations’ framework for contemporary art education, it is valuable to turn to the historical grounding of Lazlo Moholy-Nagy’s Bauhaus-era writing on art instruction, which still has a significant influence on 21st century art education. It frames the first step of creative production in higher education as “not immediately interested in the personal quality of expression which is usually called ‘art’, but its primordial, basic elements, the ABC of expression itself”1.

This mid-20th century shift in foundations practices in the United States and Europe reflected a vision, shared in Moholy-Nagy’s assessment, that the objective of foundations education should not be about the differences between artists, but rather establishing a common ground, or a sameness of artists.2 The objective for contemporary art foundations programmes assumes that, following the rudimentary development of the ABCs of art, the student advances onto higher levels of art education and art practice, making use of the simple foundations tools to build a practice that may modify or work against these very tenets. This is the process of what Wilson articulates as the “artistic rules, conventions, and skills” that we must learn before we can then turn toward “playing with those rules and images — stretching them and recombining them in one way or another to create something new”.3 This presents an image of a post-foundations art school experience as a laboratory of experimentation that, on paper, focuses on the process of artmaking rather than the product. Yet, this image of an open and fluid art school often tends to be an illusion, or as Madoff frames it, a “false state of exception”, in which constraining forces are always at play, thus limiting the potential for unfettered experimentation and true creativity.4 Such constraints include the constant pressure to produce quantifiable results in the form of art output to satisfy the requirements of assessment and accreditation, particularly if the art program is part of a larger liberal arts university.5

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Beyond academic standardisation, such uninhibited exploration is often limited by the significant influence of the marketplace as an external cultural and economic force of control and conformity that affects the organisation of art schools.6 This involves, among other factors, curators and their galleries and institutions, critics and art media publications, and collectors and dealers, all of whom form interconnected lines of control and influence that determine the styles and trends that establish the hierarchical organisation of contemporary art value systems.

These systems and structures are constantly permeating throughout the discourses in art schools, reinforcing for students and teachers alike an image of the styles, genres and mediums that comprise the accepted contemporary school of thought. As such, instead of art school becoming a space for experimentation through which new lines of artistic inquiry could escape from the dominant art regimes, the styles and trends of the art world instead serve as models for what students think they ought to be making.

To explore this mode of inquiry further, I turn to the philosopher Gilles Deleuze, who outlined one path that art educators could take in reframing creativity in teaching and learning environments.

Fundamental to this process is Deleuze’s notion of expérience, which in French encompasses both experimentation and experience.7 Expérience is not a production of identifiable results but instead touches upon difference itself, not in terms of oppositional or negative relations, but rather as an active experimental engagement that touches upon the multiplicity of infinite possibilities in the indeterminate realm, which Deleuze calls the virtual.8 Something previously unknown is expressed through the virtual, which then materialises as an identifiable form of innovation within the realm of meaning making and representation, or the actual. In this sense, the creative economy typically encourages artists to create work within the actual (according to known ways of thinking), rather than what might emerge from the virtual (or the potential of what is not known).

Expérience is always threatened by thinking that falls back into predetermined or habitual images of thought. As such, experimentation for Deleuze is always a dice throw, and we do not know whether it will lead to new lines of inquiry or new pathways that escape the habits of common sense in thinking for the artist. Expérience does not rely on objectives based on predetermined outcomes or expectations.

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For Deleuze (1983), a bad player rolls the dice repeatedly until a predetermined desired outcome is attained. The good player throws the dice “to release, to set free what lives” and “to create new values which are those of life, which make life light and active”.9 This is uncomfortable and unfamiliar because the single role of the dice is a risk that involves losing oneself. In this sense, creativity becomes a self-destructive force that embraces the unknown of the virtual and disrupts the habit of striving for safe, predetermined outcomes. Thus, in order to be truly creative as artists, we must cultivate lines that escape the realm of the actual, otherwise we will remain comfortably entrenched in the uncreative territories of what is known.

The emergence of the virtual through expérience seeks to destabilise the unification or capturing of an artistic process, unhinging representation and fixed modes of thought in relation to the styles, trends, norms and conventions of artistic practice. However, expérience is not an oppositional force working against these attributes, nor does it seek to replace the dominant regime of contemporary art. Instead the creativity of the good player creates disruptions or stutters, producing cuts in the fabric of the major structures through which escapes of habit can be made. Creativity through expérience is not about creating a tabula rasa; the objective is not to efface the ABCs of art, or the different trends and conventions of the art world. Instead, it relies upon tactics of experimentation that traverse or work through these stabilising attributes, creating an ongoing awareness of the reifying forces produced when an art practice becomes dogmatic in its adherence to rules, trends and conventions.

Since expérience for Deleuze is a throw of the dice that involves tremendous risk, there will still be artworks that will not materialise as finished products ready for a gallery, or even as a completed work for an art school assignment. In a positivist creative context this lack of production as an art object or output could be seen as a failure in a negative sense, if it is positioned in relation to the presupposed criteria of creative success. In a Deleuzian sense however, failure is a common result of the good player who is not seeking predetermined outcomes, but rather is open to an affirmation through freeing oneself of dogmatic habits of thought. Creative failure promotes the significance of the process in relation to the dominant framing of the significance of the product.

By way of a conclusion to this essay, I propose an art school mindset that levels the scale (currently tilted heavily in favour of outcomes

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and output) toward constructing a more balanced legitimisation of the milieu of experimentation, where milieu in this sense is both the environment and the middle. This addresses a major function of art that tends to become lost in the capitalist framing of creativity in artmaking, the embrace of the creation of problems over determining solutions. Problems, in this sense, are not grounded in representation, but rather they arise to push thought to its limits through confrontation with what is unfamiliar and unknown. Creativity in this sense involves an immersion into what Deleuze calls a “problematic field” that we are continually in the middle of working through rather than searching for solutions as the ultimate outcome.10 If timely creativity in the creative economy tends to be quantifiably measured as a culmination indicated by a particular outcome (such as a completed work), it can alternatively be considered as an untimely perpetual move toward virtual difference, or the ongoing progress, in unforeseen ways, towards a future not yet known. This reframing of creativity opens up a greater field of yet-to-be-imagined problems rather than narrowing to the outcomes of preconceived solutions. Beyond simply the bringing forth the production of the new, it more significantly focuses on the unknown questions that arise through creation — an emergence of a creativity yet to come.

NOTES — P. 111

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CHAPTER 2

Economy as a biological construct

Pablo Velasco UBERMORGEN Monique Grimord Geerat Vermeij 35

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PABLO VELASCO

Blockchain Morphology:

ON THE ORGANS AND EVOLUTION OF THE BLOCKCHAIN ANIMALS Cultural theorist Vilém Flusser assertively stated that we, the animals formed of organs, despise “the animal nature of the sponge”. Our evolutionary tendencies sided towards the organisation of fairly symmetrical bodies; therefore, our understanding of the radial expansion of the octopus, the lack of limbs in the sponge, or the absence of a skeleton in the snail, was permeated with a distant estrangement. However, this distance is exactly the subject Flusser aimed to observe in his essay on the Vampyroteuthis Infernalis 1.

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For him, what we find common or strange in the abyssal cephalopod tells us something about ourselves and about the world. In a similar fashion, this brief text looks at blockchains as evolving animals of the —arguably novel— digital economy, which simultaneously mirror, and detach from, human control. I adopt terminology from the field of biology to develop a morphogenetic analysis of blockchains. This strategic approach aims to provide an original standpoint to understand the unfolding environment in which blockchains have emerged and developed, and take into account their diverse instantiations and often fluid transformations.

The Vampyroteuthis has been more recently been used to represent the role of Goldman Sachs in the world economic crisis of 2008.

In a popular article in Rolling Stone magazine, the finance multinational was compared to “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity”.2 The article aimed to stress not only the responsibility and “gangster economics” of the financial giant, but also the ubiquity of its proceedings. Indeed, the specific transformations, speeds, and whereabouts of money made by Goldman Sachs are not exclusive to a single economic agent, but common to a system. For Deleuze, money is ‘perhaps’ what best expresses the distinction between the disciplinary3 and the control societies4. He compares the monetary system of the former to a mole: expressed as a numerical standard, fixed to gold and minted. The money of the discipline society acts a subterranean animal; it is heavy and moves within an enclosed space.

On the contrary, monetary systems of post-disciplinary societies move through an open space; they are light and interconnected. For Deleuze, this second kind of money is best represented by the snake. It moves undulatingly through a continuous network in the form of floating rates of exchange, modulated by various currencies, no longer constrained to an enclosed system. It is naive to think about mole money; contemporary finance models are best represented by the estrangement of the vampire squid, and by the agility of the snake.

Blockchains also fit nicely in the snake category—especially the ones associated with money, such as Bitcoin5; however, their network map is certainly a rhizomatic home, and while many parts of the animal are guided by open protocols, their operation is in many ways subterranean. The technical underpinnings are in most cases covered by a triumphant, yet superficial, rhetoric. A morphogenetic reading of the blockchain allows me to explore its fluid transformations, and to take

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into account their sometimes remarkably diverse instantiations as different evolutions of the same organism. The biological discourse, then, allows me to build up a taxonomy of a complex digital object. I identify four folded core characteristics of the organism, which are retained in all of its forms (tokens, haemodynamics, ontogenies and DNA), and four types of transformations that allow the evolution of novel animals (mutations, anagenesis, speciation and extinction).

Tokens circulate within the blockchain networks. They can be named indistinctly and serve different purposes. The most widespread function that has been stamped into the tokens is to be coins or currency units, hence the known ‘cryptocurrency’ connotation; however, tokens can have other uses. For example, Namecoin, the first fork of Bitcoin, has names for tokens, holding them for their data value and not their monetary value.6 Within the organism’s internal semantics, the tokens are unique hashes produced by a set of previous transactions. Haemodynamics refers to the circulation of tokens in the form of transactions. All tokens move in a decentralised network of nodes, and this circulation includes information on every transaction or its validation in a block of transactions. These can be as typical as the exchange of monetary units between a payer and a payee, or, like Gridcoin,7 a ‘reward’ between volunteers and researchers using the Berkley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC), i.e., a token whose circulation is used as a contribution to grid computing, in this case, for research purposes. The circulation of tokens in any permutation of the organism facilitates the production of new data, again in the form of tokens. Its ontogenies are how new tokens are generated. This operation is embedded in the haemodynamics: for every block of validated circulations, a number of tokens are generated and integrated into the organism. Transactions successfully ordered in blocks, according to certain rules, receive a fixed number of new tokens. Different animals use different notions of order and rules. Blackcoin, for example, uses Proof of Stake (PoS) to generate blocks. Since this does not require the amount of computational power used in most other animals (PoW: Proof of Work), it allows the production of a block per minute (compared to Bitcoin’s 10-minute average). Each ontogeny’s rules have their own rationale, but all animals produce new tokens by producing new blocks in a network. Some of the rules used by Bitcoin will be further explained in the next section. The last unfolding is the DNA or blockchain. A core characteristic of the organism is to have a registry of the

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ontogenies and haemodynamics of its tokens. Blockchain has become the magic word for cryptocurrencies because the concept encapsulates a technical accomplishment for open, distributed and public management of secure, private and discrete data. While the first blockchain was inaugurated by monetary data types, it is the previous broad definition of its DNA that makes it a truly ground-breaking organism of the digital age, not its particular capacity to replace financial systems.

Tokens, their production, circulation and registry are not distinct factors. DNA, ontogeny and haemodynamics do not accumulate to produce the Bitcoin organism, which does not behave as the sum of its parts; instead, they are the one and same ‘thing’, unfolding in time and space. A Bitcoin unit, for example, is a hash made from the address (wallet) of the miner who produced the block, the information of transactions in the block and the digital signatures of the addresses that made the transactions. One is stored in the other; that is, every unit is made possible by former units, which are made possible by former transactions, which are made possible from exchanges of units between addresses, and so on. Very much like a cell, every unit contains (as iterative hashes) its past and the instructions that produced it. From an essential point of view, the unfolding of these four characteristics is the ontological uniqueness of the organism, which endures along with its mutation, anagenesis and speciation processes.

The former characteristics allow us to derive four types of transformations that result in novel organisms: mutation, anagenesis, speciation and extinction. These are conceptual aids to draw a taxonomy of the multiple embodiments of the blockchain organism. A mutation denotes changes occurring in the same animal. Bitcoin, a very specific species of the money animal, has had significant changes; its code has been changed to make it more resilient to the dangers of its own environment. Minor mutations happen continuously in its code, unnoticed by the larger public or in the general behaviour of the animal; for example, in the interface clients’ competences. Bitcoin Improvement Proposals (BIP) are created by public discussions of both the development8 and implementation (Github) of a proposal. Some of these mutations have a public registry (a history of changes in the code is available at Github) and happen with minor discussion; others require more advanced levels of governance. Different branches of mutations are laid on the table and hardcore users choose to change their current branch to a new one or to ignore it. A majority decides which branch

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survives and which goes into extinction or into a parallel diminished life (with greater possibilities for extinction). I call these changes mutations because they are occurring in the same type of animal (in this case, Bitcoin).

Given the open character of the organism, major changes can also occur in these species; I refer to this process as anagenesis to differentiate it from the evolving mutations of each animal. New species can deliberately copy the original version of an organism, making almost no changes, or they can copy large parts of it with the intention to change some of its functions. Most ‘altcoins’ emerged in this way, as competing cryptocurrencies that behave differently. Litecoin, the second largest money animal, is an example of Bitcoin anagenesis. It behaves as a currency, but uses a different hashing algorithm (scrypt, instead of SHA-256), changed with the intention of democratising the mining process by making specialised mining units especially difficult to manufacture. Faster block processing and a maximum of 84 million tokens are its other functions that differ slightly when compared to Bitcoin. Litecoin has its own code branch, name, and blockchain, distinguishing it from the Bitcoin animal. It does, however, share the financial asset orientation. A majority of the animals produced in the first five years of the blockchain can be considered anagenesis of the first Bitcoin animal.

A third kind of transformation, speciation, can be technically similar to anagenesis, but produces an entirely different type of animal.

These manifestations maintain the four folding characteristics but do not necessarily identify as money or currencies. Ethereum9 is a notable example of speciation. It maintains the existence of currency units (‘ether’), but these have the function to incentivise the proper activities of the animal: to enable digital contracts. Arrangements and rules defined between two parties are deployed in Ethereum’s blockchain, and ‘ethers’ function as tokens to enable them, resembling keys more than money. This allows the creation of diverse projects, such as decentralised crowdfunding platforms,10 intelligent locks for lodging or transport lease,11 or governance platforms,12 all enabled by Ethereum’s blockchain.

Finally, a self-explanatory transformation: extinction. A necronomicon thread13, last edited in July 2014, lists a significant number of cryptocurrencies that were discontinued or unsuccessful for different reasons. The list includes animals designed for easy profits by scam

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schemes (Verocoin) or malware (Chichicoin), or simply playful experiments, such as Swagcoin, described as “like Bitcoin, but based on Litecoin, and with a lot more SWAG”.14 A majority of projects surrounding the blockchain are conducted with a fluidity similar to the recent financial economy represented by conglomerates such as Goldman Sachs. Blockchains have the fluid and metamorphose qualities that made possible the financial meltdown of 2008. Like the vampire squid, they represent the dark nature of ubiquitous underwater practices; however, they also feed the imagination of a rapidly evolving diversity that goes beyond constrained notions of money, a morphogenetic potential that surpasses its financial nest.

Some of its embodiments and permutations seem suspiciously familiar, while other carry the possibility of unknown futures.

NOTES — P. 111

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UBERMORGEN

RED COIN (CHINESE BLOOD), 2015

Chinese coin mining has recently made the People’s Republic of China the world’s largest Bitcoin producer.

Mining requires exertion and slowly makes available new currency at a similar rate to that at which commodities such as gold, copper, diamonds, nickel, rare-earth minerals, silver, uranium and zinc are mined from the ground. One of the reasons for this rapid growth is the development of hydropower in the west of the country.

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The first petahash mining farms were built in Shanxi and Inner Mongolia where coal was cheap and plentiful, but cheap coal can’t compete with free water, and the farms are migrating en masse towards the west. One of the multi-petahash bitcoin mines is nestled in the Tibetan mountains. The mining farm operates over 10,000 Antminer S5 units.

Video still from Red Coin (Chinese Blood), 2015.

Bitcoin mining is an arms race that comes down to who can produce the fastest, most energy-efficient computer chips for the least amount of money and deploy them most rapidly, very similar to the production of red blood cells in the human body, where about 100 million new red blood cells are formed every minute. Mining hardware and red blood cells both have a profitable life-span of about four months. Both processes use vast amounts of energy to create life in its various forms.

Video still from Red Coin (Chinese Blood), 2015. ⎑

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More than 50 percent of the Bitcoin network’s collective processing power, or ‘hashing power’, is contained within a group of Chinese mining pools: AntPool, F2Pool (BTC: 90.0 Phash/s on 10/7/15), BTCChina, BW Mining and Huobi. The blood-red-coloured video was filmed in a single Chinese Bitcoin mine spanning six sites, which comprised roughly three percent of the network’s total hashing power when the video was shot in 2014.

Video still from Red Coin (Chinese Blood), 2015.

Bitcoin is famously volatile, but that is perhaps one of the reasons many people love it so much – because of its unpredictability and hardcore subversive power.

Video: Mike Huntemann

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MONIQUE GRIMORD

TERRA ECONOMICS

To summarise an observation made by Slavoj Žižek: it’s much easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.* He was referring to our contemporary use of science fiction, which is full of natural disasters, wardriven apocalypses and social disorder. Our fiction of the future is obsessed with disaster because that seems more likely than the abolishment of the status quo.

* Editorial note: this observation can be attributed to both Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Žižek.

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To compete with these apocalyptic narratives, TerraEconomics uses fiction as a thought experiment to more easily imagine an economic alternative. It serves as (1) a method of critical research, (2) a collaborative thinking exercise in the form of a workshop, and (3) an interactive sculpture to sum up the idea. The initial research was sparked by the frustration that economics is treated as a hard science by both professionals and observers. We rely on datasets and fluctuating numbers as a projection of reality, rather than a metaphor for human values, desires and the overall volatility of humanity. The economy that rules our world is not a given– it’s a social science, a result of a social contract that we all agreed upon. It’s something we can change, if we want to.

Mineral monitor

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Ozone drone

THE PREMISE TerraEconomics is based on a fictional premise, or a provocative question, to begin a dialogue where we second-guess the way we determine value. In the fiction, an algorithm is developed that measures how each and every small quantity of manufactured material negatively affects the earth’s environment. A supercomputer watches global trade routes and reads the dynamic feedback of the living biomaterial of the earth collected from data points all over the world, in the oceans, forests and the atmosphere. A couple of nations decide to experiment with their economy in a radical way: no longer are the values of goods determined by the invisible forces of supply and demand, but by the flux of the natural environment, the Earth’s A.I. They call this unique system TerraEconomics.

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The premise serves as an imagination vehicle to reverse the paradigm we blindly accept in our economy. Value is often based on resource extraction from the Earth, and this extraction is awarded as property to those who have the right to it via violence or myth. Inspired by ideas of non-human personhood from thinkers such as Timothy Morton and Donna Haraway, TerraEconomics puts nature in the position of an autonomous actor in the economy and changes the way we perceive that core relationship between nature and finance.

Deep sea sensors

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Tree nodes

THE WORKSHOP The project is, in all its forms, a thought experiment; therefore, it was essential to open the experiment to a diverse group of people and probe for their interpretations and expansions. Opening the conversation through a workshop, participants were prompted to imagine a world where the stock market is controlled by the health of the Earth.

Using a series of collaborative exercises, a group of designers, architects, philosophers, scientists, engineers and writers imagined several artefacts that serve as metaphors to critique and speculate on how we manage our economic values today.

The collaborative method is called a workshop, but it is less a process of learning and is rather a process of doing and collaborating inside of a fictional space, giving the participants the freedom to depart from the constraints of reality and have a more radical imagination. The workshops are designed to transform the participants into reverse archaeologists, challenging them to look at our world from an alien perspective, questioning why things are simply the way they are. The goal is to decolonise our imaginations and shake off the prejudices and assumptions we have when we imagine our future.

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The unique model of this workshop is to collaboratively create a fictional world, not to solve an existing problem but to better understand our social and systemic constraints, and discover possibilities to break through them. The resulting prototypes serve as practical insights into complex problems, using fictional storytelling for creative epiphanies, systemic thinking and a way to critique our current reality.

Earth A.I. supercomputer

FUTURE OF THE PROJECT This project was part of a larger school of thought that speculates the role of non-humans (particularly nature and algorithms) on the economy and imagines ways that their autonomy can encourage more thoughtful behaviour from humanity. The potential of this project is as a creative methodology for taking action towards these ideas. By using the formula of the workshop, and combining design thinking and science fiction, there is an opportunity to export this to other spaces, from public policy to corporate policy, to how we invent and apply new technology, from blockchain and smart contracts to online trading and market bots.

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LEARNING FROM NATURE

Building a Healthy Economy:

GEERAT VERMEIJ

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Humans have forged an economy that has been astonishingly successful in bringing much of the world’s population out of poverty, creating healthier and safer conditions in which people live longer and more comfortably with more education, less drudgery and more opportunity.1 These improvements have been closely linked to economic growth, much of which was made possible by novel energy sources.2 The positive feedbacks unleashed by these changes were accompanied by technological and institutional innovations that have enabled individuals and organised groups such as companies and governments to become increasingly powerful.3

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Economic growth has come with costs, however. Continued economic expansion and trends toward still greater material wealth are degrading Earth’s ecosystems and putting strain on its resources.

Economic growth enables military escalation, which increases the threat of destructive war.4 Even though the energy we receive from the sun far exceeds the amount of solar energy we and the rest of the biosphere convert, our extraction of energy from all sources – fossil, nuclear and even solar – is increasingly costly.5 Humans are exceeding Earth’s capacity to supply critical material resources such as phosphate, and our co-option of the world’s living resources has been unsustainable since about the year 1980.6 Persistent economic inequality within and among nations7 prevents effective countermeasures from being implemented, including the establishment of appropriate incentives to change economic behaviour.

These problems threaten long-term economic and political security and, if not confronted constructively, will adversely affect all of humanity and most other life-forms on Earth.

Despite these costs of continued growth, most people equate a healthy economy with a growing economy. Although environmental degradation is acknowledged to be a worrisome by-product of growth, economists either reject the reality of resource limitation8 or believe that technological innovations will alleviate the problems associated with further economic expansion9. Still others largely ignore the problem altogether.10 The claim that capital formation and investments are the primary factors limiting the modern capitalist economy11 has meant that concerns over other limits and the rising costs of growth are relegated to the fringes, away from the centres of power and influence.

With rare exceptions12, economists have largely avoided asking whether and how opportunity and prosperity can be maintained in a dynamically stable economy that does not expand. Is it practically feasible or even theoretically possible to construct a healthy economy that does not perpetually grow and demand ever more material resources? Many commentators believe, usually without serious analysis, that the answer is no, as exemplified by Hardin: “There is no prosperous population in the world today that has, and has had for some time, a growth rate of zero.”13 Likewise, according

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to Landes, “All economic (industrial) revolutions have had at their core an enhancement of the supply of energy, because this feeds and changes all aspects of human activity.�14 At the root of the conundrum we face is the conflict between self-­ interest and group (or common) interest. Hardin called this conflict a tragedy of the commons, where the exploitation of resources by self-interested individuals harms those resources for the community as a whole.15 When the perceived goals of the group harm individuals, we could call the conflict a tragedy of the individual.

Adam Smith (1976) thought that all self-interested activity benefits the larger society16, but at least 10,000 years of deforestation, soil erosion, overfishing, unsustainable consumption of water from aquifers, hunting, burning and pollution shows clearly that this is untrue.17 The 800-fold increase in global human power (annual energy use) and the five-fold increase in population size since 195018 show that Homo sapiens is the first species on Earth to achieve a global monopoly, which is leading to an irreversible novel state in the biosphere.19 These tragedies are no longer local or regional, but global; simple face-to-face negotiation20 is insufficient to resolve them.

Diverging interests between individuals and groups emerge in all economic systems, in part because of a difference in the time scales over which those interests operate. The shorter lifespans of most individuals compared with those of coherent groups ensure that individuals seek rewards over the short term, whereas groups reap long-run rewards regardless of whether the groups act deliberately, as most human institutions do, or unintentionally, as ecosystems do. Crucial exceptions to the long-term interests of groups reside in investor-owned limited-liability firms, which must satisfy their investors, and many political systems, in which leaders and elected governments seek short-term gains at the expense of longer-term improvements.

The tragedies of the commons and of the individual are symptoms of failing economic health because these conflicts represent a breakdown of effective control or regulation. It is therefore important to identify the time scales and circumstances under which such

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tragedies arise and are resolved, and to ask whether resolution is possible in the modern economy.

I come to this field not as an economist but as a comparative historical and evolutionary biologist who studies how organisms interact to establish integrated ecosystems. My approach is empirical and comparative rather than theoretical, and it draws on ecosystems and organisms of the geological past as well as on those of the present. It is not utopian; my aim is not so much to identify the ideal economic system as it is to establish the conditions that enable economies and their constituents to work well, given the realities of human (and non-human) behaviour and the mix of self-interests and common interests that all economic systems must reconcile.

The benefits of turning to nature for insights about the trajectory of the modern human economy are twofold. First, natural economies encompass states, time scales and variations that exceed the range of known possibilities in the human realm. Whether these characteristics are attainable or even desirable in the human economy is less important than understanding the circumstances that enable many natural economies to prosper despite setbacks. Second, many natural economies appear to be healthy, while others illustrate processes by which long-term health is attained or restored. The aim is therefore not to duplicate nature but to learn from it. I favour a historical approach, because long-term success cannot be assessed in any other way, and because history forces us to consider real rather than imaginary or ideal economies. History tells us what happened; it shows us what works and what does not. Together with the principles governing interactions among living things, it offers a framework on which to build scenarios about our own economic choices.

CHARACTERISING ECONOMIES I define an economy as a coherent, integrated, dynamic system of metabolising, interacting participants (or members) with complementary functions related to the use and distribution of resources.

Participants compete and co-operate to secure and defend locally

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scarce resources necessary for survival and propagation. They affect and are influenced by conditions inside and external to the economy. They adapt to each other, and themselves act as agents eliciting responses in others to the extent that they are enabled or constrained by the availability and accessibility of resources.

High-powered participants including coherent coalitions exert disproportionate influences on the characteristics, activities and distribution of other members, and are therefore instrumental in establishing emergent economic properties such as stability, resilience, division of labour, productivity, feedbacks, patterns of flow of energy and materials, and long-term trends.21 The currency of exchange or interaction is expressed in units of energy or its dimensional equivalents; matter, money and capital.22 Economic performance is expressed in units of power (energy over time). Depending on the entity whose performance is being measured, power can refer to metabolic rate, individual fitness, ecosystem productivity (usable biomass fixed per unit time), profit, and gross national product (GNP) or some similar indicator of economic turnover.

Occupations in the human economy, or ways of making a living, are formally equivalent to species in ecosystems.23 I use species in the ecological sense and not as a phylogenetic or evolutionary concept.

Diversity is the number of occupations or species in the system.

Although competition for locally scarce resources is a universal interaction that determines performance in all economic systems, there would be no economy without pervasive co-operation. People perform complementary functions in the economy in the same way that species do in ecosystems, providing both sources and sinks for the resources that flow through the system as a whole. The result of this complementarity is diffuse regulation, an economy-wide property that stabilises and often enhances the availability of and access to resources.

This description admits economies at all scales, from local to global.

Furthermore, although there is variation in how economies are partitioned, all economies are fractal and hierarchical in structure.

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I use the term natural ecosystem or natural economy to refer to systems comprising non-human organisms. I do so in the full realisation that no ecosystems on Earth today are free of human influence, and that humans evolved in, and remain a part of, the economy of nature. Inclusive groups occur in all economic systems, but their nature and composition vary widely among systems. In the modern human economy, inclusive groups are organised social institutions ranging from religions to firms, schools, governments, militaries, criminal gangs and the marketplace. Economically im­ portant entities in nature include trophic levels, facilitative and other regulatory networks of species, evolved mutualisms between unrelated organisms, and animal societies. The more intimate or well-regulated the association, the greater the incentives and sacrifices for individual members to co-operate for the good of the larger group.24 This co-operation, which is typically enforced by sanctions on cheaters25, is expressed in human groups as loyalty and allegiance.

Despite these underlying variations and differences, natural and human economies display consistent long-term historical trends, thanks to the universality of competitive and co-operative interactions and feedbacks.26 The validity and usefulness of comparisons between natural and human economies have been questioned27, but the unity of their processes justifies the comparative approach to economic growth and health taken here.28 GROWTH AND HEALTH I define economic growth as an increase in the quantity of material resources (particularly those essential to metabolism) converted to economic activity per unit time by an individual (per-capita growth) or by the economy as a whole. Economic growth therefore represents an increase in power. Large-scale growth has always been accompanied by an increase in the amount and the number of sources of energy used.29 This conception of growth differs from the more traditional one embraced by economists, but the difference is mainly one of empha-

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sis. Economists view growth as an increase in labour productivity (output per worker hour) or in capital formation or investment.

Growth is then expressed as GNP or a similar measure of turnover, which is almost always assigned a monetary value. Although money is dimensionally equivalent to energy, it has taken on a life of its own in the modern economy because it accrues interest as it cycles among lenders and borrowers. The monetised metric of traditional economic growth correlates highly with growth as measured in terms of material resources.

Economy-wide growth is achievable when the resource pool is fixed, but only if matter is recycled more quickly and with near100% efficiency. Such high levels of efficiency occur globally in nature, with less than 1% of biomass wasted as buried or unusable organic matter.30 The higher turnover of matter required to sustain economy-wide growth under such conditions implies higher individual metabolic rates and therefore lower individual efficiencies for all the major players. The waste generated by individuals is therefore recycled through a co-operative network of interdependent producers, consumers and decomposers. Growth ceases when both the resource pool and the rate of resource recycling reach a plateau, causing a Malthusian condition in which there is a trade-off between the number and metabolic demand of individuals. The Malthusian condition is most commonly overcome by tapping new or underexploited sources of matter and energy.

The rationale for linking economic growth with economic health is that, when trade-offs are relaxed, allocations to multiple competing ends can all increase with little penalty. Such a large-scale expansion opens up new ways of making a living, demonstrated by the origin of cities after the rise of agriculture.31 It allows some or many members to become wealthier, depending on how equitably the benefits are distributed. Per-capita growth then leads to greater choice, opportunity and adaptability. Economy-wide expansion favours and is stimulated by new institutions, technological and infrastructural advances, and, in the human realm, the invention and spread of credit.32

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The costs of large-scale economic growth begin to exceed the benefits as resources become depleted and environmental deterioration becomes irreversible. In wealthy systems near their resource limits, further growth yields diminishing returns and incurs escalating costs.33 This threshold was passed in the United States in the early 1970s and in other Western countries somewhat later.34 In short, a growth prescription for economic health is not universal; instead, it depends on how close the system is to the threshold set by the Earth processes of replenishment and interdependencies promoting resource recycling and retrieval. Specifying this threshold is challenging in view of the different time scales over which shortterm benefits and long-term costs accumulate.

WHAT MAKES AN ECONOMY HEALTHY? Healthy economies that promote individual well-being should be predictable and orderly, resilient to shocks, permissive and flexible, fully participatory and relatively equitable. An additional criterion for a non-growing economy is dynamic stability, the balance between production and consumption. Competition cannot and should not be eliminated, but diffuse controls must limit the power that any individual or group can attain. No economic system can satisfy any one of these criteria with anything close to perfection, but most systems can approach a healthy state. Predictability enables members of an economy to act rationally based on perceived patterns, even when, as is inevitable, conditions vary and knowledge of those conditions is always incomplete. In nature, adaptation becomes possible only when selective agencies act at least once during the average lifespan of an individual.35 In the case of humans, where knowledge is cumulative and transmitted culturally, this constraint is relaxed, making even very rare events knowable and predictable. Diffuse controls and feedbacks on resources buffer variation in supply and demand, thereby promoting economic predictability and thus reducing the realm of chance in economic decision-making. Predictability and orderliness are better for economic health than insecurity and chaos.

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Resilience enables a system to recover rapidly from economic disruptions, whose magnitudes follow a power-law distribution with many minor events and a few rare crises. In natural ecosystems immediately following the great mass extinctions of the geological past, small organisms such as single-celled phytoplankters and terrestrial fungi and ferns recovered quickly, within weeks to a few years.36 In contrast, apex predators with long generation times, as well as stable interdependencies among species that stabilise and often increase resource availability, require hundreds of thousands to millions of years to become re-established37; however, post-­ extinction systems without these stabilising influences are ephemeral and unstable38. A monopoly subjected to an economic shock is also likely to be ephemeral, because an inappropriate response cannot easily be rectified.39 Likewise in the human realm, the collapse of economic relationships and political organisations –in our case often caused by war, financial mismanagement or ill-conceived policies by powerful institutions40 – is accompanied by a breakdown of stabilising feedbacks and greater unpredictability. Recovery takes years to decades depending on the robustness of the economic and political institutions. It will be faster if vital links within the economy are maintained (e.g. through trade) and if semi-autonomously functioning units can experiment with different potential solutions.41 Semi-autonomous agents (individuals, compartments and groups) together form an economy that is interconnected yet flexible enough to withstand and recover from shocks without compromising the system as a whole. In a rigid system, such as a centrally planned human economy, there is little scope for individual-level autonomy or initiative, because every action has repercussions throughout the system, allowing errors to spread like an epidemic.42 A highly centralised organisation works well only when internal controls forge a highly buffered, homeostatic system, whose component parts are so intimately connected (or genetically identical) that they are almost entirely subservient to the good of the whole. This organisation characterises many insect societies as well as the bodies of individual animals with a central nervous system and a finely tuned physiology.43 Even here, however, the

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individual parts enjoy a certain autonomy and versatility, enabling them to develop and function without interfering with the rest of the system. The key for human society, in which individuals differ genetically and act independently either alone or in groups, is that self-interest must retain a prominent role, with incentives in place to discourage cheating and excessive enrichment. Centralisation is ineffective in systems prone to uncertainty, unpredictability and error44, which is to say, most or all economies.

A fully participatory economy is one in which all members contribute meaningfully. In nature, all species eke out a living of some kind even if they do not all benefit the system as a whole. As in the human economy, natural ecosystems are rife with cheaters: kleptoparasites that steal prey from predators, nectar-robbers that do not pollinate flowers and stealth males that mate without doing the work of courting.45 An ideal of scrupulously fair competition – paying for what you get – therefore seems unattainable in either natural or human economies. On the other hand, given the widespread occurrence of deception, it is clear that economies can be essentially healthy as long as cheating is kept in check through adaptation and a diffuse system of controls and sanctions.

Strict economic equality is unknown, unattainable and undesirable in any economic system. A factor of 1021 separates the smallest and largest individual organisms in terms of body mass46, while the per-capita metabolic rates of multicellular organisms vary by a factor of 105.47 The average per-capita wealth among nations varies by a factor of approximately 40048, and individual yearly income ranges over seven orders of magnitude. Near-perfect equality is undesirable because it robs individuals of the essential incentives for self-improvement and for co-operation with others. Forms of social inequality such as differences in access to education and justice are unaffected by this argument and should be reduced.

For human societies, Piketty suggests that economic inequality is higher and social mobility is less in Malthusian economies, and that growth tends to diminish inequality.49 Reich, however, points out that, although inequality in the United States was reduced by the economic growth from 1945 to 1970, the rise of hyperdominant

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firms and huge increases in executive pay since 1970 caused later growth to magnify economic inequality.50 Under which circumstances does a powerful economic agent become so dominant that it establishes an unhealthy monopoly, or tragedy of the individual, and how can health be restored?

Models of financial wealth accumulation51 indicate that inequality can arise and grow simply by chance in a world of trade-offs when gains are multiplicative or self-reinforcing, as is the case with interest on investment and with inheritance of wealth. Expansion of an economy, ecosystem or human society can lead to greater inequality of wealth among members, especially if the total stock of wealth increases and if suitable countermeasures that work well at smaller scales do not keep pace with the greater scale of economic activity, as in today’s globalizing economy.52 The human monopoly was achieved culturally in the competitive ecosystems of Africa and Asia, and culminated with the onset of the Anthropocene in 1945, when the human footprint on the world’s biosphere and sedimentary record became overwhelming.53 Ecological history can illuminate the processes by which economic health is gained, maintained, lost and restored.

AN ECOLOGICAL HISTORY OF HEALTH Evidence from ancient ecosystems indicates that healthy, flexible, dynamically stable economies have existed and thrived on time scales of thousands to millions of years in the absence of longterm growth, even as competition in the broad sense (including predation and parasitism) was omnipresent. Despite spatial and temporal variation in diversity and species composition, ecosystems ranging from relatively simple estuarine communities to three-dimensionally and trophically complex reefs and forests persisted continuously as recognisable units over very long time intervals. These systems persisted because the patterns of economic interdependence, resource flows and evolutionary selection, once established, stabilised the system as a whole, making the criteria for success for individual survival and propagation predict-

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able for each species. Within this established order, competitive interactions enforced adaptive responses (or, more commonly, an adaptive status quo) to the extent permitted by the availability and accessibility of resources. Adaptation along established pathways can continue as long as the pattern of selection remains the same; for example, selection for greater stature and deeper roots, which gain trees more access to light, water and nutrients, heightens the bar for success without altering the direction of adaptation.

Likewise, more powerful enemies raise the standard of performance for some prey species but do not select for novel defences or make old ones obsolete unless predators employ new techniques for securing prey.

Ecosystem health is also indicated by the finding that animals mostly get enough to eat. Individual animals, ranging from herbivores to predators and from insects and fish to mammals, have been found to have full stomachs when sampled in the wild.54 This relative absence of poverty does not only apply to animals with the highest metabolic rates (and thus greatest competitive ability), but also to competitively subordinate species. The times and places where animals can feed are often limited by the high risk of predation or interference, but species have adapted to such circumstances. Where resource supply is chronically low, as in the deep sea, successful consumers have low metabolic rates and modest food requirements. Chronic hunger is therefore rare in healthy ecosystems.

Evolutionary trends toward greater mobility and increased nutrient exchange among ecosystems, together with the evolution of food storage by plants and animals and the development of positive feedbacks between plants and their herbivores, enhanced ecosystem stability by increasing the collective insurance against local resource fluctuations. Rapid and long-distance movement by animals enables many species to locate and track shifting food patches, and also facilitates large-scale trade among ecosystems.

For example, the evolution of pterosaurs, and later of birds and large mammals, facilitated the exchange between marine and terrestrial.55 Animals that dive or migrate vertically in the open sea retrieve nutrients from the deep water and bring them to the

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surface, complementing or even replacing wind-driven upwelling as agents of higher productivity.56 The storage of food by caching mammals, birds and social insects, as well as in plant bulbs, tubers, above-ground stems and seeds, is a geologically relatively young capacity that provides a hedge against times when food would otherwise be scarce. It is notable that all these capacities require significant energy investments, which pay off in the stabilisation and enhancement of the resource pool and in the promotion of overall ecosystem health.

Comparable but much faster trends enriched, diversified and stabilised the resource base for human societies. Increases in the speed and distance of trade and the ability to dry, can and freeze food for later use have yielded increasing returns even as the energy required to support these activities has also increased.

Nearly all individual multicellular organisms in nature experience intervals of body growth, during which they increase their per-capita power and very often expand the range of habitats they occupy or the foods that animals can eat. In other words, despite threats from competitors and predators, growing organisms experience increased opportunity and, if they reach adulthood, maintain a viable position in the ecosystem even if growth ceases, as it does in insects, birds, mammals and many molluscs. It is true that opportunities and choices are most available to individuals and groups with the most power, and that specialisation entails limitations on choice, but adaptations associated with specialisation to particular habitats or ways of life also mean effective exploitation of the opportunities that do exist. In short, individual-level opportunities exist in dynamically stable ecosystems that do not grow in the long run.

Three caveats are in order. First, conditions in dynamically stable economies tend to favour the adaptive (and economic) status quo among species, and are generally unfavourable to innovation and change.57 The status quo is neither perfect nor optimal, but it works.

Trade-offs among competing functions within individuals and among members of an economy ensure that improvement on one front entails sacrifice and compromise on others. This limitation would be relaxed if trade-offs could be circumvented without incur-

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ring metabolic costs. The available data from nature show, however, that all evolutionary innovations that relieve existing trade-offs and that enhance competitive prowess are accompanied (and likely enabled) by increasing metabolic rates; that is, by expanded time-energy budgets.58 Adaptability and flexibility, whether at the level of the individual organism or at the scale of the larger economy, are thus more difficult to maintain in the absence of growth than when more resources became available and accessible.

Second, the apparent health of natural ecosystems is maintained in systems in which power is widely distributed and metabolically limited. Power is shared among several species, and is almost all derived from metabolic processes. Extrasomal technologies that are either secreted by the body or built from materials in the environment exist, but the additional power enabled by nests, webs, burrows, dams, mounds or shells pales in comparison with human technology.59 The maximum metabolic rate in animals (160 W/kg in orchid bees60) is dwarfed by the power of a jet engine (greater than 10 kW/kg61). Differences in per-capita power between humans and other animals are even greater than those expressed on a perweight basis, and for groups the differences are greater still. Forces generated by animals in killing their prey are tiny compared with those of modern human weapons: the maximum bite force inferred with confidence for any animal is about 34 N in the Late Cretaceous predatory dinosaur Tyrannosaurus rex62, whereas atomic weapons generate the equivalent of 107 tons of TNT. This contrast in maximum power raises the question – still unanswered – of whether a healthy economy can exist with elites powerful enough to eliminate their enemies over large areas. In contrast to human economies, in which monopolies are common and largescale, hyperdominance by individual species or coalitions is rare, local and ephemeral.63 In one well-studied case in Peru, stands of the ant-protected tree Tococa occidentalis monopolise space for about 40 years until trees of other species outcompete the Tococa, whose resident ants cannot reach the encroaching competitors.64 The power and reach of natural monopolies are limited. A related point is that tragedies of the commons and of the individual are more likely to be associated with extremely powerful entities with

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short-term interests than with less potent economic players that exercise more diffuse controls over longer time scales. Economic health and economic power therefore appear to be antagonistic to each other.

The third caveat is that, despite the long-term persistence of recognisable ecosystems in the geological past, the history of life also chronicles pervasive trends toward increasing productivity, diversity, mobility, metabolic activity and the exploitation of previously inaccessible resources.65 These trends, powered by the evolution of competitively dominant producers and apex predators, imply longterm growth. This trend is episodic rather than gradual or continuous, with major pulses likely primed by increases in resource supply generated by Earth processes such as mountain-building, erosion and tectonically related massive volcanic eruptions, all of which bring new nutrients within reach of organisms.66 Growth enabled by resource expansion may have been intermittent, but it is a pervasive theme in history, culminating in the economic hegemony of our own species. The implication is that ecosystems of the past must have endured episodes of ill health. This raises the question how and over what time scales economic health was restored in nature.

THE RESTORATION OF ECONOMIC HEALTH IN NATURE Disruptions, either from outside the ecosystem or arising from within, have the potential to undo the feedbacks that keep the system in a healthy state. These destructive forces affect the dynamic equilibrium between production (or supply) and consumption (or demand), and thus tamper with the regulatory system that prevents any one sector from overexploiting another. The result is either hyperdominance – ­ the natural equivalent of a totalitarian state – or a supply-related economic collapse.

Destabilisation of a healthy economy occurs when a novel regime of selection is established, changing the criteria of success for key members of the economy, or when interdependencies among members dissolve. Animals with large appetites and new methods of exploitation may evolve or arrive from elsewhere, habitats can

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coalesce or fragment, and the rates and sources of nutrient supply can change. Disruptions severe enough to cause mass extinction entail a collapse in primary production, with repercussions for all but the most resistant members of the system.67 Overexploitation always involves the absence or elimination of controlling agents such as apex predators or immunological host defences against parasites. Outbreaks of insect pests occur in intensely disturbed environments, in which the culprits are not well regulated by predators.68 The same likely applies to red tides in coastal ecosystems and disease epidemics of corals, seagrasses, sea urchins and forest trees. A study of six seemingly intact forests69 showed that trees in successive generations were shorter in stature as soil nutrients declined. Although this study made no mention of animals in these forests, it is almost certain that large herbivores and apex predators had been decimated in previous centuries, rendering these forests unsustainable without an external input of nutrients.

Stability can be restored if new interdependencies among species become established. Ecological history shows that shifts from one stable state to another are not readily reversed.70 Some examples of ecological restoration to health are pertinent here. When oxygen first entered the atmosphere 2.5 to 2.6 billion years ago71, it posed a dire threat to global ecosystems dominated by anaerobic microbes.

The evolution of aerobic respiration, followed by the emergence of eukaryotes (symbioses between a bacterium and a member of the Archaea, creating the foundation for all multicellular life;72), established a biological sink for oxygen and led to a dynamically stable ecosystem of one-celled organisms that persisted for about one billion years.73 Subsequent increases in oxygen opened the evolutionary door to energetically more demanding multicellular animals74, nutrient mining by animals burrowing in sediments75, active swimming in the open sea76 and animal flight77. The mass burial of carbon on land, which formed huge coal deposits, was halted by the evolution of herbivores, which recycled these nutrients instead.78 Nutrient cycles were severely disrupted during mass extinctions, and stabilised only when large consumers had re-evolved.

These examples show that ecosystems can successfully recover even after the most severe disruptions, and that evolution (or, in

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the human case, cultural processes) can create or restore healthy economies from unstable ones. Life’s resilience is extraordinary given that living things have inhabited our planet continuously for at least 3.5 billion years.

A HEALTHY HUMAN ECONOMY Can the criteria and mechanisms for building and maintaining a healthy economy in nature be applied to the modern human economy? The enormous power that humans achieved both individually and on a global scale, together with our highly social nature and all of its implications for status, have created conditions that few organisms or ecosystems in nature have approached. It is therefore important to proceed with caution in applying insights from nature to the human economy. Moreover, because the present analysis emphasises material resources and environmental degradation rather than the formation and availability of capital, many problems of the modern economy are left unaddressed here.

With the current emphasis on growth as the universal cure for all economic ills, it is highly unlikely that a smooth transition to a healthy, dynamically stable economy is possible without considerable hardship. Such a transition would at minimum require (1) greater economy-wide resource efficiency; (2) a resolution of the tragedies of the commons and the individual to stem the breakdown of natural economies and the overexploitation of irreplaceable resources by short-term interests; (3) a curb on how much wealth and power an individual or group can acquire, likely accompanied by losses of income and influence among the richest members; (4) a shift in the criteria for achieving success and social status from material wealth to greater altruism towards, or co-operation with, others humans and non-humans; and (5) an agreed limit on human population size, with the possibility of decline through attrition. Market-driven and top-down incentives will be needed to effect this transition.

One traditional prescription for a more sustainable economy calls for a more efficient use of resources in the system as a whole.79

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At the level of individual organisms in nature, high efficiency is invariably accompanied by very low rates of energy and material loss, and thus by very low metabolic rates.80 Powerful individuals are highly inefficient because they generate excess heat and produce large quantities of waste in the form of faeces, shed leaves and bark, and moulted feathers, skin and hair. Any costs associated with such inefficiency are greatly outweighed by the benefits that come with greater competitive power. At the scale of the economy as a whole, however, high efficiency is crucial for stabilising resource flows. It is achievable by recycling resources among functional groups, which form a network of interdependencies involving producers, consumers and decomposers. Such high collective efficiency is likely the only feasible way for human society to reduce irretrievable waste. As many economists have pointed out, this would entail the inclusion of external costs of extraction and recycling in the price of goods and services.81 In the modern globalised economy, exporting such costs to third parties or to the rest of the biosphere is no longer a tenable option. The highly interconnected global economy ensures that these costs will no longer be external but will be borne by many sectors and ultimately by the system as a whole.

Many economists continue to believe that scarce resources are replaceable by alternatives through the price mechanism in the free market.82 Besides the reality that prices can be manipulated by powerful agents in ways unrelated to resource supply and demand, replacement seems more a hope than a viable solution, especially when the resources in question are food, fertilisers such as phosphate, potable water, particular species and living space.

The alignment of self-interest with the common interest is key to a healthy economy, and is achievable only when diffuse controls limit per-capita and collective power. Roopnarine has suggested that a tragedy of the commons with respect to an irreplaceable resource could be alleviated by co-operation for other scarce commodities.83 Such regulation would include market-driven incentives, as well as more centralised policies agreed and enforced through negotiation.84

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Examples of incentives and policies that could reduce conflicts between self-interest and societal interest include taxing accumulated wealth across generations, investor-imposed limits on executive incomes, science-based decision-making, universal access to family planning and contraception, and corporate governance involving employees and community representatives. A system of checks and balances operating under liberal-democratic principles should limit the power of firms, governments and organised interest groups, and the prices of goods and services should by law incorporate the costs of disposal, recycling and environmental mitigation.85 In short, centralised authority must not be so weak that individual interests are allowed to override long-range group interests, nor be so strong as to create a monopoly or totalitarian regime whose errors cannot be corrected and in which individual initiative is suppressed.

In nature, power is rarely if ever voluntarily ceded.86 Evidence from mammals shows that apex predators are highly vulnerable to disruptions in food supply and display higher rates of species turnover than smaller predators.87 Evolutionary reductions in power of dominant competitors are very rare, except when mainland populations of large animals colonise less productive islands.88 A voluntarily agreed curb on wealth and power in human societies is feasible if appropriate incentives are in place. Behavioural economists have shown that the pain of loss is much more acute than the pleasure of gain.89 In fact, imposed sacrifices by the wealthy and threats to their status have often led to war – a particularly destructive manifestation of the tragedy of the individual – because the richest members of the economy have the most to lose.90 On the other hand, the rise of philanthropy by the rich shows that voluntary spending of great wealth for good causes is possible, because it is increasingly associated with a high social status. Harari points out that dissolution of colonial empires by European powers after 1945 was mostly voluntary because it coincided with those powers’ self-interests.91 Voluntary transfers of political power characterise most liberal democracies by agreed law.

The case for effecting a limit on human population growth by voluntary means is especially problematic. After an exponential

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growth phase lasting into the late 20th Century, human population growth is slowing but is globally still continuing. As women’s rights and education expand and the costs of raising children increases, the number of children per family is dropping in societies with rising living standards.92 This decrease reflects a change in incentives, although in China it was also centrally mandated by the one-child policy of the late 20th Century. An interesting factor contributing to the trend is the spread of effective contraception, which has begun to decouple the sex drive from reproduction. Against these hopeful signs, many nations and religious authorities oppose contraception and other forms of birth control, and economists including Simon argue that increased population growth is beneficial in the long run because it will generate more geniuses who will solve the world’s problems.93 An aging population without complete replacement also burdens workers who must subsidise the non-working elderly.

These arguments notwithstanding, human society will revert to a relatively impoverished Malthusian state if populations continue to expand and to tax diminishing resources even more heavily.

Success in the human realm has a strongly social component linked to status and reputation.94 Given their cultural transmission, such social norms can change rapidly. For example, bravery became a mark of success with the advent of territorial conflict, which arose when societies ceased to be nomadic. With the invention of money, nearly every quality that society values came to be expressed in terms of financial wealth.95 Slavery and child labour have been abolished in large parts of the world, and there has been a long-term decline in violence at all levels of society.96 Spending on social welfare witnessed an upward trend in the last three centuries97, and environmental protection has taken hold over the past 150 years, once Alexander von Humboldt pointed out that human activity was wreaking great damage.98 The liberation and education of women, mores about sex, the rise of the scientific worldview and the spread of democratic government99 represent hopeful and rapid shifts in cultural norms toward a less exploitative ethos.

Patterns of consumption in relation to social status have also changed dramatically100, indicating that preferences for limits to conspicuous consumption could become fashionable in affluent societies given the right incentives. Tim Jackson, like many before

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him, believes that altruism toward others – human and non-human – is becoming a more important indication of status.101 I agree, but note that altruism and co-operation are not necessarily the same thing.102 Given that co-operation more often arises out of self-interest, it may be more effective in the long run than altruism.

CONCLUDING REMARKS Nature shows that it is possible to construct and maintain healthy ecosystems for extended periods of time. By studying the history of natural economies as well as that of the human system, we are beginning to understand the circumstances under which healthy economies are established and thrive. Most important among these conditions is a dynamic balance between powerful entities and competitively subordinate contributors to the economy.

Disruptions on either the production side or at the level of powerful consumers creates an imbalance or even a collapse of the system, because one or another sector is no longer effectively regulated or maintained by networks of interdependent species. The result of this breakdown is overexploitation and irreversible change, which are manifestations of tragedies of the commons or of the individual. Health is restored when new controls – top consumers and interdependencies among species - are re-established.

Although it is true that humans are in many ways unique among animals, and that our economic and social system differs in its institutions, scope and power from all other economic systems that have existed on Earth, these differences do not give our species license to ignore or flout economic principles that have been in force since the origins of life some 3.5 billion years ago. The key is to apply these principles of control and regulation, which operate in healthy and recovering ecosystems, to our own situation, which currently puts us on a path to an increasingly irreconcilable clash between individual self-interest and the common good of humanity and the rest of life on Earth. The chief obstacle, it seems to me, is excessive power at all levels in the human enterprise.

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Although society has made progress in learning how to deal with some aspects of this power, we are far from putting into place the incentives and policies necessary to regulate it, or to keep our vast capacities in check and steer them toward less destructive ends.

The transition to a healthy economy that does not depend on perpetual growth in resource use will not be easy. It will require more than increased recycling, eating less meat, becoming more altruistic, increasing or decreasing self-sufficiency, and letting governments or the free market solve all the problems, or any of the other remedies that have been suggested over the years. The history of natural economies shows that tragedies of the commons and of the individual are resolved only when the criteria for what it means to be successful change, usually through the imposition of new selective regimes or the establishment of novel social norms and interdependencies among economic actors. Given our fundamentally social nature, the best hope for a pathway toward a healthy economy is a shift from excessive consumerism to a less materially intensive ethos, in which success and reputation are more closely linked to the long-term viability of our species and life on our planet.

NOTES — P. 111

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CHAPTER 3

Economy as a social construct

Josef Bares Meredith Degyansky Jennifer Lyn Morone™ Inc Mark van der Net Nicholas McGuigan Thomas Kern 77

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JOSEF BARES

Creating through consuming:

USING SHOPPINGBASED RESEARCH TO REDEFINE THE MARKET ECONOMY In Consumption, Hong Kong, Volume 1, I trace the relationship between the private sphere of individual decision-making (e.g., what to buy for dinner) and the public sphere of aggregated socioeconomic effects we learn from the news (including company revenue, stock price, GDP and unemployment), in the specific circumstances of Hong Kong. The work is part of an ongoing series of works1 that utilise my personal consumer decisions (shopping) as a starting point for a critical investigation of cognitive capitalism.

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Consumption, Hong Kong, Vol. 1 (top down view)

The understanding of attention-directing and knowledge-producing cognitive faculties as a form of intangible capital has strongly shaped our lived experience over the last few decades.2 Both on-line and off-line, consumers are faced with an increasing number of decisions when selecting a product or service, but also when selecting which activity to allocate attention to.3 The trends go hand-in-hand with info-technological developments4, leading to a decoupling of consumption from the materiality and use-value of the products consumed.5 Yet despite these developments, semioticised and financialised consumption is driven by our material bodies, needs and desires,6 which are all manifested through the idiosyncratic coping tactics of everyday life.7 I take everyday consumption as the starting point through which to conduct my research. Consumption is used as a hinge that allows for hyper-reflexivity, while staying true to an art practice-based approach where experience is transformed into expression; taking another step closer towards life and engagement with the everyday, while at the same time maintaining a critical position that sets the art apart from life itself.8 My approach exemplifies the continuing significance of everyone’s potential to act as an autonomous creative individual by linking the facts that everyone is a consumer and that consumption is creation, while questioning the mechanisms of the market economy.

Economists like to use term ‘dollar voting’ to explain the analogy between consumer decisions and political decisions; just as citizens

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choose between a number of political candidates, consumers use their dollars to select which products and companies will be the ‘losers’ and ‘winners’ of the market race.9 Theoretically, this example is used to highlight the ultimate power of consumers over producers.

In my research, I traced my own consumer decisions during 12 consecutive months in Hong Kong (September 2013 – August 2014) and related them to daily news items. I also documented my personal narrative, which is related to the more general experience of living in Hong Kong; for example, the market saturation means that most people buy groceries in one of the two major supermarket chains, as I did.

The average monthly expenditure level documented in my work was similar to that of the majority of Hong Kong households.10 I use a ‘decision recycling’ process, where previous independent consumer decisions (decisions made during the period preceding the project itself) were used to determine the selection of the news item for each day of the monitored period. Within the data set, each purchase (‘consumer decision’) was associated with the retail company where the purchase was made. These companies are grouped according to company holdings (10 company holding categories and four generic categories for unattributed consumption). News items published on the same day as the purchase were selected by searching for keywords such as the company name, holding company name, company owner name, or, when no news item could be found, more generic terms such as “Hong Kong economy”.

The research findings are presented in a linear narrative form. The publication documents the consumer decisions and associated news items day by day, including the full text of the news item. The physical book is a thick paperback printed in black and white, comprising 826 pages. It contains a preface (explaining the context) and an introduction (explaining the method), followed by the body of the book, which lists the author’s daily consumption in Hong Kong and one daily news item. It is a physical manifestation of the slow process/experience of reading and connecting disparate pieces of information relating to Hong Kong, its corporations and the global economy.

A video presentation serves as a condensed visual counterpart to the publication. It is based on the same dataset, displayed in the form of a virtual 3D data sculpture consisting of a spatial arrangement of white spheres and news headlines in an infinite black space. Each sphere represents the spending on one day with one specific company

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onsumption, Taiwan, July 2014. Page spread from C photobook, offset print, 40 pages (2015)

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group, and the diameter of the sphere represents the amount spent.

The spheres are ordered horizontally according to spending type and company group (14 categories), and ordered vertically according to time. Each vertical layer represents one day and is associated with one news item headline (the associated news articles can be found in the book). The fast-paced video makes it barely possible to read the news headlines. The soundtrack of the video mirrors the visual pace; it consists of voices reading out the news headlines, overlapping one another so that only fragments of the uttering can be understood. Different channels of the video show different points of view of the data sculpture, and are presented either as simultaneous projections or as a single-channel version uniting different virtual camera angles.

In the context of this research, the pleasurable activity (shopping, consuming) becomes the starting point of a long circuit11 of knowledge creation by applying the following logic. Acquiring knowledge is related to the technology of writing, while acquiring goods (consumption) is related to the technology of exchange (the market economy).

The technical bases of writing and the market economy constitute their ambiguous natures, which makes them prone to the creation of short circuits, resulting in the reproduction of dominant ideas (the common sense doxa).

Stiegler describes the ambiguous nature of technology as “pharmacological”, by which he means its drug-like dual potential to serve as a poison (destructive short circuit) and as a cure (constructive long circuit). For example, in the case of writing, formulaic copying and memorizing reproduces existing false assumptions and oppressive ideas without questioning them, and thus leads to a stagnation or even a destruction of knowledge. Yet the same technology (writing) can be also used as a highly productive tool to question, generate and disseminate new knowledge. History has shown how new knowledge enabled through writing lead to a redefinition of writing itself.

A similarly ambiguous nature underlies the market economy. It tends to constitute a self-perpetuating truth and unchangeable status quo of global capitalism. Yet I believe it does have a “pharmacological” nature that allows consumption to be used in new ways that in turn will redefine the market economy itself. In the employed method of this research, consumer decisions are recycled as a “data breeding” tool to generate further information/knowledge via a metaphoric approach.

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The creative process functions as a sense-making mechanism12, resulting in a new distribution of sensibilities13 through the attempt to provoke a “multiplicity of folds and gaps in the fabric of common experience”.14 This can be described as entrainment breaking15, the process of producing a movement from the realm of the known (consumer decision records), an existing state of distribution of the sensible, into the chaotic array of open sets (the events that were reported in the news). This is the breaking of the existing distribution of the sensible (doxa), where shopping is simply understood as that which it is: shopping. Through the application of decision recycling (reusing consumer decision records as search keywords) and data breeding (extending the consumer decision record database into a narrative form), I move back towards a more ordered state of complexity. Through this move, long circuits of transindividuation16 have been established and a redistribution of the sensible is induced.

The research method developed in Consumption, Hong Kong, Volume 1 thus proposes a model of how everyday personal consumer behaviour data can be employed within a creative practice. This model also provides some insight into what it means to conduct research through artistic practice, by balancing on the line between the everyday and art, the micro- and the macro-economy, or, in Rancière’s words, the line between two different aesthetics.17 The work highlights the gap between data visualisation and the source data by placing them next to each other. The data collection process for this work highlights the cognitive labour executed by the consumer in the process of decision-making. The data appear to be “useless” to the consumer, while the very same transaction records are being aggregated, data-mined and monetised by marketing research specialists. The question of the efficacy of dollar voting, invoked in the beginning of this paper, is left open for personal consideration.

NOTES — P. 112

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Family portrait

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MEREDITH DEGYANSKY

THE FICTIO­NAL FORMALITY OF CAPITALISM It’s 1988. This is a picture of me, my ma and my two older sisters. I’m the youngest one, there on the left, the one that is sceptical about this whole situation. My dad is there on the right. His head is lopped off, foreshadowing how he would be leaving us in just a few months for a woman who was younger, thinner, and unburdened by children.

A woman who drank beer, chomped loudly on her bubble gum, put her bare feet on the dashboard and had hair that changed colours depending on the season. While he was off with her exploring Rome and Paris, and signing a lease on a one-bedroom apartment in NYC, the four of us (me, my ma and my two older sisters) were trying to get our emotional and professional feet back on the ground.

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My mom and dad accidentally had a child right out of high school, then accidentally got married, and then accidentally had two more children. I think my parents thought that it would work out anyway; they would have babies, buy a house, Dad would work a corporate job in the oil industry and Mom would stay home to do woman’s work.

This is what their parents did in the 1950s in the U.S. The plan backfired when Dad left with his corporate paycheque and a hot babe.

My mom didn’t have a degree and had little professional experience.

This meant we had to tap into the resources we had around us, to figure out how to survive with each other. We spent a year sharing a bedroom in my mom’s parents’ house – my two older sisters in the bunk beds and me and my mom in the queen-sized bed. Eventually my mom got a job with a temp agency and we were able to live in our own apartment. To me, everything felt great. On the weekends, the four of us went on hikes at Hinckley Park. After the hikes, my mom let us eat ice cream cones for dinner. Soft serve vanilla custard with sprinkles.

We called ourselves The Wilderness Girls because that’s what we were.

Girls that could survive in the wild.

Even though we had each other and kept ourselves busy, my mom went on some dates. She dated this guy Ed, who I liked because he had a pool and bought us a Nintendo and a VCR. And then she dated this guy Harvey, who was old and chubby and hairy but my mom liked him because he had a sailboat. She was really into dating men who would buy us stuff, which was fine, but luckily one day we just ditched all the men and the apartment and the job at the temp agency, and unfortunately the ice cream dinners. We packed ourselves into a moving truck to move in with my mom’s grandma. Riding down the open highway with all our stuff and not a care in the world – I’ll never forget that moment. We were hot and powerful. I was five years old.

We settled in in Maryland with my great grandmother. The plan was that my mom could go to college for a degree in education while we lived with my grandmother. Instead of paying rent to her, we (me and my sisters) helped out around the house. You know, earned our keep or whatever they say. Saturday mornings were reserved for deep cleaning, which was actually really fun because my oldest sister, Erin, always blasted that Edie Brickell song, Circle. You know the one, with

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the lyrics that said, “And being alone is the best way to be, when I’m by myself it’s the best way to be”. It’s a song mopey teenagers listened to in the 90s. And even though the music felt really lonely, I kind of liked that feeling because it felt honest. I would feel all sad but in an inspired way while I was cleaning the bathroom sink and squeegeeing the toilet bowl.

Whoever cleaned the toilet got extra poker chips because it was the dirtiest work. We got poker chips as compensation for completing our chores, but the most hilarious thing is that they weren’t even redeemable for anything. It was like a game my mom made up that really tested one’s greed. I wanted all of them. I wanted to get the most poker chips. But beyond Saturday chores, each day we were obligated to set the table for dinner, wash and dry the dishes, take out the trash, use our manners, and blah blah blah.

The point is that, later on when I went out into the real world and made my own friends in 5th grade, we (me and my friends) started setting up all sorts of community businesses.

Charlie Folk and I started advertising heavily for our newly developed pet-sitting company. We designed cute flyers and went door-to-door with them, and posted them on telephone poles all around town. And then later that summer in the dead heat of July, my friend Megan Stafford and I got smart and started a Kool Aid stand in the Lavale Methodist Church parking lot. It was only 25 cents a cup but lots of people gave us a whole dollar.

I could go on for days about this, but the bottom line is that I grew up with a bunch of resourceful, communicative women who made things happen and picked themselves up after making mistakes that society coerced them into doing, like accidentally marrying a man who was sort of a douchebag, and then accidentally buying a house with him, and then accidentally having too many babies, and then accidentally saying all you would do is stay home to take care of the house and kids.

It’s like life forces you to think you need to be a certain way and fit into certain boxes.

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And all these “mistakes” and “boxes” and “life forces” only exist because of this enormously awful famous word that is invading the world. This famous word is CAPITALISM. And I am sure you have heard of the even worse form of capitalism too. The word that turned people into consumers and claims that it is human nature to be competitive and value efficiency above all else. The word that has privatised everything. This word is NEOLIBERALISM. Which leads us into this idea of the free market, which doesn’t seem so bad if we could just sell things we make on the street and then just go home with that little bit of money we made each day, but it has actually exploded and doesn’t work as a free market at all. There are all these regulations on little businesses and none on big businesses, so the rich keep getting bigger and richer.

And this next word may, arguably, be the worst word to ever happen to the U.S. I think it comes from the same line of thought as sitting in chairs and eating with forks and knives. It’s a word that formalised things that don’t need to be formal. Like do we really need to sit above the ground? And what is wrong with our hands? Our hands are utensils! This word is BUREAUCRACY, which means forms, and rules, and long phone conversations with robots.

But in the U.S., some people don’t have to go through as much bureaucracy to do the things they want or sell the things they want. If you are a child, you can sell lemonade on the street and it’s no big whoop because you are cute. And if you are an artisan or a hipster selling leather handbags, it’s ok because you are a white person. If you are a white person, you won’t get arrested or harassed by the police, and you won’t get killed either.

But one thing we need to remember about the U.S. is that, currently, we have a lot of immigrants and refugees. Our real estate developer president may destroy that fact but it’s actually what makes it so vibrant and interesting here. The issue with all of the words above is that they do not work in favour of these folks because my country is racist. If you come to the U.S., it takes forever to get papers to claim that you are

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even a valid citizen who is then able to freely join the ranks in neoliberal free market capitalism.

Coming to the U.S. as an immigrant means you have to figure out how to survive within capitalism because you need to eat and you need shelter. You have to figure out how to do that without the bureaucracy.

People are doing it. It’s called the informal economy.

Local economy

In NYC, the public transportation doesn’t reach certain neighbourhoods, generally the poorer neighbourhoods where many immigrants and people of colour live. Dollar vans are unmarked vans that have regular stops that you can only find out about by talking to people. A ride costs a dollar and each neighbourhood’s version of this shadow transit embodies the culture of that neighbourhood. For example, in Flatbush in Brooklyn, a Caribbean neighbourhood, you’ll see a stream of dollar vans with Haitian flags tied to their antennae, Bible scriptures in colourful decals across their windshields and advertisements for local reggae concerts pasted on their side windows. An unlicensed 24-year-old, who goes by the name Skates, operates one of the most recognisable vehicles in Flatbush, outfitted with a massive sound system that can project inside and outside the van, plus fifteen synchronised television screens that broadcast a steady stream of rap and hip-hop music videos.

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Or take the Carrot Cake Man from West Philadelphia. Carrot Cake Man has made 144 carrot cake muffins every morning for the past 35 years.

He then walks the streets of Philadelphia and the subways selling the cakes for a dollar each. You can’t find the carrot cake man; you have to stumble upon him. He is easy to spot though, always in this hat and always carrying this large tray.

A loosie is a single cigarette that folks generally sell for $0.75, or two for $1. Lonnie Warner sells Newports on 8th Avenue in Midtown Manhattan nearly everyday. The tax on cigarettes in NYC keeps rising, so he smuggles in cartons from cheaper states and sells them on the streets. He usually makes about $150 dollars a day and has been arrested for this 15 times. The people in court know him now as a friendly guy and going to jail for three days every once in a while is part of his regular routine. Plus, when he is in jail he can get a regular medical check up, since he doesn’t have health insurance. They do regular health screenings for all the inmates. He does this work to make money, but also says he loves the streets, loves meeting people.

Rosa Photo is a truck parked on Callowhill Street in Philadelphia.

For 26 years, they have been helping people with the bureaucracy of getting fingerprints, background checks, passport photos, filing for citizenship for immigrants, random permits, and other bureaucratic mumbo jumbo. Underground information says they issue fake IDs to immigrants. If you are an immigrant without an ID in the U.S., it is very easy to deport you. If you have an ID, it’s too hard for police to prove that you are not a citizen.

Ana Alvarado sells churros for $1 in the subway stations in NYC during rush hour on Monday–Friday. She usually makes about $100 a day and needs this money to feed her family. She’s been arrested seven times for selling churros, but keeps doing it because it’s her only option and one night in jail isn’t a big deal. The worst part of getting arrested, she claims, is watching all the police officers in the office scarf down the rest of her churros.

These are just a few of the stories of the many, many, many informal economies that exist in the U.S. From the stories I told, you can see that some of these folks have more success than others, and that power and

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authority still rule. But what I like to realise when walking down the street is that there is this rich sense of economy and culture that actually pervades, which showing me that CAPITALISM IS NOT REAL. It seems real because it is taking over. But there is a way to sell only the amount of carrot cake muffins each day that allows you to live a decent life. You don’t have to get bigger. You don’t need more poker chips.

And in turn it has made me realise that none of these other systems are real either.

NEOLIBERALISM is MADE UP! THE FREE MARKET is FAKE! BUREAUCRACY is the ultimate FICTION! MONEY is totally BOGUS! Holy shit, do you think that capitalism is a fictional economy that a lot of people are using? Have we all been duped?

NO! We haven’t because not everyone is using it!

Our realities only exist based on what we decide to do, what we use.

Not everyone submits to this system, and some people can’t even get into the system! These informal economies may be deemed fictional by the law and power in the U.S., but they are actually the realities of the majority of the people. Minorities are the majority. And our realities are being swallowed up by the fictional formality of capitalism.

How can these informalities of family and economic life become the dominant reality in capitalist societies?

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Video still, part of JLMinc project

Video: Ilona Gaynor

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JENNIFER LYN MORONE™ INC

NEW ECONO­MIC MODEL

Jennifer Lyn Morone™ Inc., founded in 2014, is a multidimensional project designed to expose the lies and mythology of Capitalism by working within the concrete structures that comprise the system itself.

One example, explored within the project, is the multi-billion-dollar personal data industry, created in just 10 years of commercialised Internet, which achieves its success through the exploitation and commodification of personal data — information generated by people during everyday life through the use of information communication technologies.

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New Economic Model

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– WORK IN PROGRESS – THIS SYSTEM IS DEPENDANT ON EACH INDIVIDUAL AS THE OWNER OF THEIR PERSONAL DATA, THE USE OF THE CORPORATE FORM FOR INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY RIGHTS, AND FULL ACCESS TO MARKETS. GDP IS REPLACED WITH UNIVERSAL BASIC INCOME TREASURY.

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The collection and sale of personal information has become not just a supplementary revenue stream for companies, but their dominant business model. Furthermore, any regulation or restriction of the trade of personal information is incompatible with the functions of an advanced capitalist global economy and of surveillance states. These circumstances have created a playground where major ICT corporations are driving technological progress, racing to get everyone and everything online, atomising all experiences, every process, all that exists, into data, transforming the very nature of existence itself into something that can be bought and sold.

In response to this, American-born artist Jennifer Lyn Morone became the founder and owner of Jennifer Lyn Morone™ Inc, and is a data producer. She took the corporate form because it is currently the only way she could claim her personal data as intellectual property. The project is a protest against data exploitation, the lucrative market that perpetuates it, and the unfair benefits afforded to corporations.

Appropriating the vernacular of corporate culture, she developed a business model that is designed to determine the value of an individual. By embodying a purpose solely driven by capitalistic methods and mentality, Jennifer Lyn Morone™ Inc. satirically highlights the struggles, legalities and technical boundaries of human-designed systems, while calling into question our notions of Self, ownership, and property in relation to corporate personhood, personal data and immaterial labour in the Digital Age of Capitalism.

The New Economic Model diagram is a recent addition to the overall project that is an honest thought experiment of a potential economic representation if individuals were the rightful owners of their personal data. This diagram proposes merely one version of how society could work if the profits earned from various industries were collected and via a department that redistributes these gains through a Universal Basic Income program.

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MARK VAN DER NET

EGONOMIA

MONEY FOR YOUR VALUES

There is simple joy in waving around your money. You move through life with a sense of personal achievement, power and potential. The world feels more open with money in your pocket. But the world also loves to separate you from your money as quickly as possible, both physically and mentally — so quickly that you might never have that feeling of empowerment to begin with.

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What if you could issue and spend money based on the things you value in life? A reminder that money is just a means to an end, proof that you control your money. How could money work in such a way that it serves the values of people instead of the other way around?

How can a local economy be built from shared local values?

EGONOMIA is a pop-up money system that experiments with values, behaviours and outcomes. It was first held at the Economia festival in Eindhoven in April 2017, and consisted of an ecosystem of economic objects; a cash machine, cash registers and many transaction objects such as billboards, tip jars, voting jars and even a gambling machine.

Instead of the relatively neutral euro, yuan or dollar, the money bills of EGONOMIA are issued based on the abstract personal values stated by the participants in an on-line questionnaire. There were six denominations in circulation: freedom, status, care, certainty, community and aspiration. People received four of these bills from the cash machine to spend freely. Every note was imprinted with an individual motto or interpretation of the face value. These private and intimate bills had people exchanging beliefs and opinions even before spending their money.

Cash in hand, participants performed transactions to purchase drinks, tickets and more. Buying a drink and giving it to a stranger reflected the value “care”, gambling expressed “freedom”, and a VIP treat would signify the personal importance of “status”.

In every transaction, the participants were confronted with the specific values on which they spent their money, and could monitor and reflect on the results of the whole economy on a big screen. The most popular denomination was freedom - both in bills printed and in transactions – but the others weren’t far behind. Most importantly, participants embraced these values as evident, important and connected to their own life. Their personalised mottos showed consistent meaning and hinted at many ways of translating these values into concrete actions.

The bills led to numerous transactions but also to interesting changes in social behaviour. Some people were positively surprised by the coffee offered by a complete stranger, and it was never so easy to organise rounds of drinks between friends. Some things stayed the same

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Design of customised EGONOMIA bills

Bills design: Hansje van Halem

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though; one person became very rich – and consequently drunk – by exploiting a technical glitch in the gambling machine.

Because of the presence and ease of the ecosystem it was quickly adopted among the more familiar mainstream pin machines, credit cards, cash and other economic objects. The experiment shows how quickly these economic infrastructures are adopted and move into the background, powerfully shaping behaviours on an unconscious technological level. Luckily it doesn’t take people too long to try out new systems once some incentive – such as a free drink – is involved.

Of course, by tying cash and transactions to abstract personal values and placing an emphasis on confirmation and reflection, EGONOMIA implied that participants should rationally align their values and actions, which they did quite admirably.

I wonder whether more consideration and deliberation surrounding care for the environment or the aspiration to end social inequality could be achieved by supplying consumers with information on the impact of their choices in our daily economic system. Maybe we don’t need a new economic system – as is sometimes said - but rather we need to constantly engineer parallel and competing systems, through which we become conscious of their mechanisms and can steer the outcomes.

The next phase of EGONOMIA is the creation of a local currency within the Strijp-S Eindhoven district and a parallel economy that integrates non-monetary values, such as knowledge, innovation, collaboration, sharing and volunteering, which can run and be governed as a self-supporting system.

For now, I love to think that in some wallets, leftover EGONOMIA bills still remind the owner of the importance and meaning of freedom, care or certainty. They are waiting to be taken out once again when there is an economy that incorporates them as valuable and impactful.

EGONOMIA project details: Mark van der Net and Wiepko Oosterhuis | Creative and technical lead: Mark van der Net | Product design: Nicky Liebregts | Partners: Baltan Labs, VPRO Medialab and Park Strijpbeheer

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NICK McGUIGAN

THOMAS KERN

A counting for the language of

MODERN-DAY ECONOMIC FICTIONS “Once you choose hope anything is possible.”

– Christopher Reeve

Economy is fiction. We are presented with everyday economic fictions that we see, hear, feel, taste, smell and, in essence, consume to satisfy our human need for safety and security. We play the economic game with the promise of obtaining wealth; with wealth comes money, and money enables us to buy all that we need or desire. Health, food, education, art, sex and even community are commodities able to be bought and sold on the market we choose to conform with. We positively bind ourselves in economic fictions – unlimited growth, enhanced GDP, value creation, profit maximisation and economic rationalism – because these are the fictional stories we have chosen to tell ourselves.

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Behind all great novels lies an intricate, well-crafted, masterful use of language. This exquisite craft of language enables a piece of fiction to become convincingly real. It is this business language – the language of ac‘count’ing – that is used to tell our modern-day economic fictions.

Accounting metaphors have constructed a monosyllabic language that supports a seemingly objective linear view of reality, a language that is driving our current degenerative economy.

Our economic and financial systems are complex, paradoxical and prosaic. It is the accountant’s role to present these “complex multi-dimensional realities”1 in reports that are ‘true, fair and understandable’.

Those reports and subsequent analyses are the basis for system-wide decision-making by governments, investors, managers, lenders and consumers, in essence all members of society. Accountants prepare their reports and analyses through metaphorical constructs – a mostly monetary, numeric view of reality – where numbers are insufficiently representative of a broader, more diverse environment.

Accountants are part of a complex web of constructed reality.2 Their reports represent versions of reality, be it the economic viability of an organisation, the costs and benefits of a particular investment decision, or the operational effectiveness of a production system or public investment. Those numbers decide whether employees are hired or fired, which public services are offered, what we as consumers can choose to see, listen to, feel, taste and smell, and how wealth and resources are distributed across communities. Simultaneously, decision-makers use those numbers to avoid personal accountability.

This numerical language is used (and abused) to justify decisions in favour of particular interest groups. Numbers stand between the decision-makers and the decision-takers.

Accountants’ metaphoric representations become a part of the fabric through which a situation is accounted for (or not accounted for). This results in a circular social construction, for, in representing reality, we as accountants are constructing reality.3 Accounting metaphors play a particularly powerful role in human lives. Lakoff & Johnson describe metaphoric representation as pervasive in our everyday functioning

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Nick McGuigan and Thomas Kern

“The concepts that govern our thought are not just matters of the intellect. They also govern our everyday functioning, down to the most mundane details. Our concepts structure what we perceive, how we get around in the world, and how we relate to other people. Our conceptual system thus plays a central role in defining our everyday realities. ‌ the way we think, what we experience, and what we do every day is very much a matter of metaphorâ€?.4 Our accounting language permeates all facets of life, reducing our decisions to mere financial consequences. This belief in financial fairy tales prevents our ability to empathise, collaborate and share with our neighbours.

The future of work, climate change, innovation, technology, sustainability, political instability and the overconsumption of resources represent systemic factors that will continue to reshape how human populations live and work. Society is entering the fourth industrial revolution, an era of artificial intelligence, automation and global connectivity, transform-

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ing how humans organise.5 A smarter, more connected world necessitates a move towards holistic systems-design thinking, which should be integrated and based on a smarter, more encompassing language, allowing renewed economic fictions to evolve – economic stories that place ecological and sociological factors at the heart of the economy.

Language allows us to create new thoughts. It has the ability to change our behaviour and perspectives. Language enables us to write new economic fictions. To transition global and local economies towards regeneration and resource preservation, we need a new holistic form of language that accounts equally across ecological, sociological and economic aspects. The accounting language requires enrichment through a broader, more dynamic craftsmanship, to re-diversify our monosyllabic culture. A language that draws from diverse forms of nutrients, that incorporates non-financial, non-monetary values such as human, social and environmental factors. Our greatest challenge is therefore to change the language of business from one of ac‘count’ing to one of accountability.

But what exactly does it mean for us to be accountable? Accountability may begin with our ability to ‘fit’ ourselves within the ecosystem we cohabit. Permaculture, a creative design process based on whole-­ systems thinking, is one such system that facilitates this form of accountability through its ethics and design principles. Permaculture is Figure 1. Permaculture ethics and design principles.

Richard Telford, Permaculture Principles, 2017.

made up of three foundational ethical principles; care of the Earth, care of people and the return of surplus. Circling these ethics are 12 design principles; observe and interact, catch and store energy, obtain a yield, self-regulate and accept feedback, use and value renewables, produce no waste, design from patterns to details, integrate, use small and slow solutions, use and value diversity, use edges and value the marginal, and creatively use and respond to change (represented in Figure 1).6 These 12 design principles act as thinking tools, which can facilitate the creative redesign of our environment and human behaviour towards more accountable futures.

Mollison describes permaculture as “a philosophy of working with, rather than against, nature; of protracted and thoughtful observation rather than protracted and thoughtless labour; and of looking at plants and animals in all their functions, rather than treating any element as a single product system�.7 It is through such a holistic permaculture lens that we may begin to creatively Review and Re-imagine businesses, accounting systems and the wider economic environment.

The traditional capitalist language of economic fictions provides a reductionist view of the world, breaking complex systems down into simpler components to understand and manage. We view computer manufacturing quite separately from the mineral mining and petroleum production so critical to this process. The resulting effects this has on the environment, politics and economics of a region are not sufficiently taken into account. Holism, however, places all of these into an integrated systems perspective that can be used to find optimal solutions. An evolving language needs to have this comprehensive view. It should represent the integration of business activity so that eco-efficient decision-making can occur. Permaculture principles provide us with a significant vantage point, as they provide a form of bio-mimicry that mirrors the complex reality of our ecosystems.

The economy is a fictional language currently in transition, providing us with an opportunity to explore and push its boundaries. We see future-oriented education that stretches the bounds of tradition, operates at the edges and creatively values diversity, expands critical awareness and facilitates the development of more responsible future decision-makers as the perfect lever for change.

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We instigated The Accountability Institute8, a progressive, forward-­ thinking, educative space for creating new forms of transformative learning. The institute’s vision is to develop a holistic language for reporting and decision-making that extends beyond money. To achieve this, we aim to foster collaborations between art, science, technology and economics, bringing these fields into conversation to create a new language – a language of accountability.

It is precisely this change in the language of business – from one of ac‘count’ing to one of accountability – that enables creative collaborative futures for business, accounting and economic systems. Changing this language is critical so that we can all begin to tell ourselves more accountable fictions.

NOTES — P. 112

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CONTRIBUTOR BIOGRAPHIES

Josef Bares Josef Bares is an independent researcher and media artist of Czech/German origin, currently living and working in Hong Kong. Bares’ area of interest lies in the systems of signs; he uses different methods to visually convey the processes taking place in signification – the creation of meaning. His artworks have been exhibited across the globe. ecr229@msn.com Daniel de Bruin Daniel de Bruin is a Dutch designer who graduated from the HKU, University of the Arts in Utrecht. In his work, de Bruin explores his role as a designer in an age where computers and machines are taking over manual labour. De Bruin creates wondrous installations that push the boundaries between man and machine, such as the spectacular Neurotransmitter 3000 and the mechanical 3D printer This New Technology. danieldebruin.com Dan E. Burr Dan E. Burr is a multi-disciplined, award-­ winning graphic illustrator and cartoonist.

He is known for his work on the widely acclaimed and celebrated graphic novel Kings in Disguise, and as the graphic illustrator for the book ECONOMIX: How our Economy Works (And Doesn’t Work). dan-e-burr.com

Paolo Cirio Paolo Cirio is a conceptual artist who works with the legal, economic and semiotic systems of the information society. He investigates social fields impacted by the Internet, such as privacy, copyright, politics and finance.

He shows his research and intervention-based works through artefacts, photos, installations, videos and public art. paolocirio.net Meredith Degyansky Meredith Degyansky is an artist, educator, student debtor, precarious labourer and counsellor. Her artwork explores alternatives to capitalism by enacting economies that aren’t based in current economic structures. Her research interests include exploring what individuals and communities do when suffering financial crises on both the micro and macro level. theworkintern.org Michael Goodwin Michael Goodwin is a freelance writer from New York who has always loved comics and history. His interest in history led him to an interest in the economic forces that underlie much of history, and he eventually started reading up on economics. His previous efforts include interpreting Chinese, writing comedy, photography, disaster relief, dealing art (ineptly) and writing about medicine.

Monique Grimord Monique Grimord is an American interactive designer and artist based in Amsterdam.

She is part of the creative duo Imagination of Things. In her work, she uses inventions as a storytelling device for brands, and design fictions as a method of cultural commentary. moniquegrimord.com Ilan Katin For the past decade, Ilan Katin has worked in a wide variety of disciplines including graphic design, illustration, comics, installations and animation. His illustrations, logos and character designs have been featured in a variety of online and print publications. ilankatin.com

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Thomas Kern Thomas Kern is an Instigator of The Accountability Institute. His work involves public speaking, facilitating formal and informal education, permaculture activism, and running community and public events.

Nicholas McGuigan Nicholas McGuigan is an Associate Professor in Accounting at Monash University, Australia and an Instigator of The Accountability Institute. His work revolves around student conceptions of learning, integrated reporting, innovation, systems design and regenerative economics.

Jennifer Lyn Morone Jennifer Lyn Morone is an artist, designer and researcher whose work focuses on economics, politics and technology, and their influence on society and the human experience. Morone realises alternatives to present realities, incorporating various media including video, digital, print, objects, business models, legal documents and narratives. jenniferlynmorone.com Mark van der Net Mark van der Net is an architect, urban designer and programmer. His studio OSCity (Open Source City) explores the overlap of society and technological systems with data installations, web platforms, social experiments, research, exhibitions and design systems. oscity.eu Brett Scott Brett Scott is a campaigner, former broker and the author of The Heretic’s Guide to Global Finance: Hacking the Future of Money. He works on financial reform, alternative finance and economic activism with a wide variety of NGOs, artists, students and start-ups, and writes for publications such as The Guardian, New Scientist, Wired Magazine and CNN.com. suitpossum.blogspot.com Timothy Smith Timothy Smith is a post-doctoral researcher in the Department of Art at Aalto University School of Art, Design and Architecture in Helsinki, Finland. He completed his graduate

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coursework at Ohio State University, receiving his MFA from the Department of Art in 2012 and his PhD from the Department of Art Education in 2016. He has exhibited internationally as an artist, and has curated exhibitions on photography and materiality in the United States.

UBERMORGEN The Vienna-based artist duo UBERMORGEN (lizvlx and Hans Bernhard) are an established name in the field of digital art. Their main body of work consists of internet art, installations, video art, photography, software art and performance, and uses the convergence of digital media to produce and publish both online and offline. ubermorgen.com Pablo Velasco Pablo Velasco is an Early Career Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Study and a PhD Candidate at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies, University of Warwick. His research critically explores digital culture through its technical infrastructures. pablov.me Lenara Verle Lenara Verle is a Berlin-based artist and researcher. Verle has a keen interest in the technology of money and studies artists who create new experimental currencies as a form of art. As part of her research, Verle creates her own conceptual art projects. lenara.com Geerat Vermeij Evolutionary Biologist Geerat Vermeij is distinguished Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at the University of California. By examining and analysing fossils for evidence of interspecies competition and predation, Vermeij has prompted the field of paleobiology to acknowledge the profound influences creatures have on fashioning each other’s evolutionary fates.

NOTES

DISRUPTING THE CREATIVE ECONOMY IN ART SCHOOLS 1 Singerman (1999): 113.

2 Ibidem.

3 Wilson (2004): 312.

4 Madoff (2009): 276.

5 Elkins (2001).

6 Madoff (2009).

7 Williams (2003): 76.

8 Deleuze (1994): 84.

9 Deleuze (1983): 185, emphasis original.

10 Deleuze (1994): 165.

BLOCKCHAIN MORPHOLOGY: ON THE ORGANS AND EVOLUTION OF THE BLOCKCHAIN ANIMALS 1 Flusser and Bec (2012).

2 Taibbi (2010) https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/ news/the-great-american-bubble-machine-20100405 3 Foucault (2012).

4 Deleuze (1992): 3–7.

5 Nakamoto (2008) https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf 6 Namecoin Wiki, ‘FAQ’: https://namecoin.org/docs/faq/ 7 Gridcoin: http://www.gridcoin.us/ 8 Sourceforge: https://web.archive.org/ web/20150501202544/http://sourceforge.net/p/bitcoin/ mailman/bitcoin-development/ Ethereum: https://www.ethereum.org/ 9 Weifund: http://weifund.io/ 10 Slock.it: http://slock.it/ 11 BoadRoom: http://boardroom.to/ 12 Bitcointalk: https://bitcointalk.org/index. php?topic=588413.0 13 GitHub: https://github.com/getswagcoin/swagcoin

BUILDING A HEALTHY ECONOMY: LEARNING FROM NATURE 1 Landes (1998); Clark (2007); Pinker (2011); Gordon (2016).

2 Boyden (1987); Hall et al. (2003).

3 Mokyr (1990); Micklethwait and Wooldridge (2003); Ferguson (2011).

4 Russett (1983); Goldstein (1988).

5 Brown et al. (2011).

6 Rojstaczer et al. (2000); Wackernagel et al. (2002).

7 Reich (2007); Piketty (2014).

8 Arndt (1978); Harari (2015).

9 Harari (2015).

10 Piketty (2014); Gordon (2016).

11 e.g. Piketty (2014).

12 Lawn (2005).

13 Hardin (1968): 1244.

14 Landes (1998): 40.

15 Hardin (1968).

16 Smith (1976), see also Kristol (1981).

17 Perlin (1989); Hillel (1990); Ostrom (2007); Vermeij (2012); Smith et al. (2011); Darimont et al. (2015).

18 Cohen (1995); Hall et al. (2003); Brown et al. (2011).

19 Lenton et al. (2008); Rockström et al. (2009); Barnosky et al. (2012).

20 Ostrom (2007); Frischmann (2013).

21 Vermeij (2009a); Vermeij and Leigh (2011).

22 Vermeij (2009a).

23 Ibidem.

24 Olson (1982).

25 Leigh (2010).

26 Vermeij (2004a; 2009a; 2013); Vermeij and Leigh (2011).

27 Mokyr (2006).

28 see also Vermeij (2009a; 2010).

29 Vermeij (1987; 2004a; 2013); Judson (2017).

30 Field et al. (1998).

31 Algaze (2001).

32 Mokyr (1990); Clark (2007); Ferguson (2011); Gordon (2016); Trentmann (2016).

33 Inglehart (1996); van den Bergh and Kaller (2012).

34 Daly and Cobb (1994); Daly (1996); Max-Neef (1995); Reich (2007).

35 Vermeij (2008a).

36 D’Hondt et al. (1998); Vermeij (2008b).

37 Ibidem.

38 Vermeij (2008b); Godbold et al. (2017).

39 Pennington (2013).

40 Ibidem.

41 Ostrom (2007); Vermeij (2008a); Pennington (2013).

42 Vermeij and Leigh (2011).

43 Turner (2006).

44 Vermeij (2008a); Pennington (2013).

45 Leigh (2010).

46 West et al. (1997).

47 Makarieva et al. (2008).

48 Landes (1998).

49 Piketty (2014).

50 Reich (2007); see also Gordon (2016).

51 Scheffer et al. (2017).

52 Ibidem.

53 Rockstrom et al. (2009); Waters et al. (2016).

54 Huey et al. (2001); Arrington et al. (2002); Jeschke and Tollrian (2005); Jeschke (2007).

55 Polis et al. (1997); Vermeij (2004a).

56 Doughty et al. (2016).

57 Vermeij (1987; 2004a).

58 Vermeij (2015).

59 Gould and Gould (2007); Arthur (2009); Hansell and Ruxton (2015).

60 Dudley (1995).

61 Marden and Allen (2002).

62 Gignac and Erickson (2017).

63 Vermeij and Leigh (2011).

64 Morawetz et al. (1992).

65 Vermeij (2004a); Vermeij and Leigh (2011).

66 Vermeij (1995; 2004a); Lane and Martin (2010); Allmon and Martin (2014); Lane (2015); Judson (2017).

67 Vermeij (2004b); Roopnarine (2006); Roopnarine et al. (2007).

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68 Davis et al. (2011).

69 Wardle et al. (2004).

70 Sutherland (1974); Schefer et al. (2003); Mayer and Khalyani (2011); Barnosky et al. (2012).

71 Soo et al. (2017).

72 Lane and Martin (2010).

73 Brasier and Lindsay (1998); Laakso and Schrag (2017).

74 Planavsky et al. (2014); Chen et al. (2015).

75 Droser et al. (2002); Buatois et al. (2016).

76 Klug et al. (2010).

77 Graham et al. (1995).

78 Vermeij and Lindberg (2000); Labandeira (2006).

79 Foley (2017).

80 Vermeij (2004a); Edwards et al. (2015).

81 Daly and Cobb (1994).

82 Arndt (1978).

83 Roopnarine (2013).

84 Frischmann (2013).

85 Hawken (1993); Daly and Cobb (1994).

86 Colinvaux (1980).

87 Van Valkenburgh et al. (2004).

88 Raia and Meiri (2006); Leigh et al. (2009).

89 Kahneman (2011).

90 Colinvaux (1980).

91 Harari (2015).

92 Cohen (1995).

93 Simon (1977).

94 Fehr (2004).

95 Ferguson (2008); Harari (2015); Trentmann (2016).

96 Pinker (2011).

97 Lindert (2004).

98 see Wulf (2015).

99 Zakaria (2003); Ferris (2010); Ferguson (2011); Harari (2015).

100 Trentmann (2016).

101 Jackson (2017).

102 Hwang and Bowles (2012).

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CREATING THROUGH CONSUMING: USING SHOPPING-BASED RESEARCH TO REDEFINE THE MARKET ECONOMY 1 Bares (2014); Bares (2015).

2 Davenport and Beck (2001).

3 Benayoun and Bares (2016).

4 Zwick and Denegri Knott (2009).

5 Baudrillard (1996).

6 Deleuze and Guattari (1983).

7 Certeau (1984).

8 Rancière (2006).

9 Mises (1951).

10 Census and Statistics Department (2014): http://www.censtatd.gov.hk/hkstat/sub/sc60.jsp 11 Stiegler (2013).

12 Kurtz and Snowden (2003).

13 Rancière (2004).

14 Rancière (2008).

15 Kurtz and Snowden (2003): 478.

16 Simondon (2009).

17 Rancière (2006).

A COUNTING FOR THE LANGUAGE OF MODERN-DAY ECONOMIC FICTIONS 1 Morgan (1988): 480.

2 Hines (1988).

3 Ibidem.

4 Lakoff and Johnson (1980): 3.

5 Schwab (2017).

6 Telford (2017): https://permacultureprinciples.com/ downloads/Pc_Principles_Poster_EN.pdf 7 Mollison (2011): 1.

8 The Accountability Institute: https://www.facebook.com/ theaccountabilityinstitute/

BIBLIOGRAPHY Algaze, G. Initial social complexity in southwestern Asia: The Mesopotamian advantage.

Current Anthropology 42 (2001): 199-233.

Allmon, W. D. and R. D. Martin. Seafood through time revisited: The Phanerozoic increase in marine trophic resources and its macroevolutionary consequences. Paleobiology 40 (2014): 256-287.

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Region”. (2017): http://www.censtatd.gov.hk/hkstat/sub/sc60.jsp Ethereum: https://www.ethereum.org/ GitHub: https://github.com/getswagcoin/swagcoin Gridcoin: http://www.gridcoin.us/ Nakamoto, S. “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System”. October (2008).

https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf Namecoin Wiki. “FAQ”: https://namecoin.org/docs/faq/ Sourceforge: https://web.archive.org/web/20150501202544/http://sourceforge.net/p/ bitcoin/mailman/bitcoin-development/ Taibbi, M. “The Great American Bubble Machine”. Rolling Stone (2010):

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-great-american-bubblemachine-20100405 Telford, R. “Permaculture Principles”, adapted from David Holgrem’s Permaculture: Principles & Pathways Beyond Sustainability. Hepburn: Mellidora Publishing (2017): https://permacultureprinciples.com/downloads/Pc_Principles_Poster_EN.pdf The Accountability Institute: https://www.facebook.com/theaccountabilityinstitute/ Weifund: http://weifund.io/

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Daily ‘Economix’ presentation by Michael Goodwin and Dan E. Burr at the Economia festival (April 2017).

Photo by Diewke van den Heuvel.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Baltan Laboratories is grateful for the kind support of everyone who helped to make this publication possible. The enthusiasm of the artists, scientists, scholars and designers involved was heart-warming and made this adventure an enjoyable journey.

This publication, the Economia festival and the second Renewable Futures conference held in 2017 were kindly supported by Brabant C, the Creative Industries fund NL and the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union. The collaboration with artist Daniel de Bruin was kindly supported by Mondriaan Fund. Our special thanks go out to RIXC from Riga, Latvia, the head of the Renewable Futures programme. Without their support, the Renewable Futures conference and this publication would not have been possible.

Unless otherwise specified, the copyright of all images and contributions are retained by the artists/writers.

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COLOPHON The Economia concept was developed for Baltan Laboratories

by Wiepko Oosterhuis and Olga Mink

Editor: Olga Mink & Wiepko Oosterhuis Text editing and translation: Radboud in’to Languages Design: HeyHeydeHaas Print: Art Libro | Coers & Roest Project Leader: Marlou van der Cruijsen

Abraham Meeuwsen Project officer: Vivian Fontijn Publisher: Baltan Laboratories Contact us via: info@baltanlaboratories.org

www.baltanlaboratories.org Renewable Futures conference international scientific board: Katja Kwastek, Armin Medosch†, Gedeminas Urbonas, Misko Suvakovic, Jussi Parikka, Dieter Daniels, Douglas Kahn, Lev Manovich, Laura Beloff.

Renewable Futures conference local board: Katja Kwastek, Daniëlle Arets, Annie Fletcher, Dan Diojdescu, Ingrid van der Wacht, Alain Heureux, CeesJan Mol.

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ISBN 978-90-815830-3-9 ISBN 978-90-815830-3-9

9 789081 583039 9 789081 583039