[spectre] MoneyLab #8 - Minting a Fair Society // Value extraction and the workforce of the cryptocene

[Marcela Okretič]

Dear all,

you are kindly invited to join us at the last session of MoneyLab #8 -
Minting a Fair Society, a  live streaming series running from 11 May to 29
June 2020 at https://aksioma.org/moneylab8. You are very welcome to share
your comments and questions trough the live chat.

 

STREAM #8 / Monday, 29 June 2020 at 5 pm CET

Value extraction and the workforce of the cryptocene

With Martín Nadal, César Escudero Andaluz, Telekommunisten, Sašo Sedlaček
and Nascent

Moderated by Aude Launay

 

Value is classically said to stem from human labor, and money to represent
this value. Although those theories have been made obsolete by, among other
things, the subjectivization of value which opened the door to the
narratives of financialization, the idea that value should be objectively
linked to the steps of its production endures in our economic imaginaries.
Whether 'labor was the first price, the original purchase-money that was
paid for all things' or whether its value was indexed to the profit derived
from it-the consequences of which we can see now more clearly than ever when
it comes to the wages of 'essential workers'-the production of value with
regards to labor still stands as one of the most pressing issues of the
digital evolution.

It is interesting to bear in mind that, in the Western European region, work
doesn't seem to have been socially valued until relatively late-around the
18th century-but has then been largely glorified by the nascent modern
education system of the 19th century. An activity traditionally devalued, or
even at times condemned, since antiquity, work was then opposed to the
spiritual meaning of life (and actually, to military activites too). Human
beings were to find self-fulfillment with otium (meditation, reflection,
poetry and politics.)-or war­-, and not with its negation, negotium (trade,
business.).

After centuries of direct workers exploitation, the late 20th century saw
otium and negotium merge in a new knowledge economy that extracted value
from intellectual and cultural work. What some view as a path towards a sort
of 'dotCommunism' unfortunately mostly led to a 'data is the new oil' state
of mind. The situation and the history that produced it are of course more
complex and it's an attempt at mapping them through the lense of the
massification of interest in cryptography that Martín Nadal and Cesar
Escudero Andaluz propose with Economy, Knowledge and Surveillance in the Age
of the Cryptocene.

Not only did data extraction turn each and every internet user into an
unwitting worker by turning otium into negotium, but it is also heavily
damaging everyone's attention capacity to the point of seriously reducing
our critical thinking ability. This is the question addressed by Ishtar
Gate, a blockchain-based micro-economy-in-the-arts platform devised by the
writer and visual theorist Penny Rafferty together with Nascent, designed to
reward the reading of critical content and its comment with tokens
exchangeable in real life. One step further in this return to valuing otium,
Sašo Sedlaček turns some data extraction technologies-such as real-time pose
estimation-against themselves, and allows the users of its Oblomo platform
to mine cryptocurrencies while standing still, and to exchange the product
of those physically inactive moments for the workforce of other people
willing to, for instance, mow your lawn or wash your car. And what if, in
this age of ever-expanding automation, we could evaluate the machinic
workforce and transmit it through a currency? Embedding the classical labor
value theory in a rational digital cryptocurrency, the Haket designed by
Telekommunisten is intended as a criticism of the Bitcoin architecture and
as way to rethink it as a stable currency thus usable as a currency.

 

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
------------------------------------------------------------

Follow the programme here:

FB event > https://www.facebook.com/events/527075734629065/

Telegram > https://t.me/aksiomaorg

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
------------------------------------------------------------

 

Organised and produced by: Aksioma - Institute for Contemporary Art,
Ljubljana, 2020
For the series:  <https://aksioma.org/tactics.practice/> Tactics & Practice
In the frame of:  <https://kons-platforma.org/> konS - Platform for
Contemporary Investigative Art
In collaboration with:  <https://www.kinosiska.si/en/> Kino Šiška - Centre
for Urban Culture and  <https://www.kinosiska.si/en/> Institute of Network
Cultures / Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences
In partnership with: <https://rijeka2020.eu/en/>  Rijeka ECoC 2020 and
<https://www.ufg.at/Master-Programme.1594+M52087573ab0.0.html> Interface
Cultures Department / Kunstuniversität Linz
Media partners: Neural magazine, We Make Money Not Art, TAM-TAM, Radio
Študent

 

The project konS - Platform for Contemporary Investigative Art was chosen on
the public call for the selection of the operations "Network of
Investigative Art and Culture Centres". 

The investment is co-financed by the Republic of Slovenia and by the
European Regional Development Fund of the European Union.

 

 

Marcela Okretič

Aksioma | Institute for Contemporary Art, Ljubljana

Jakopičeva 11, 1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia

 

Aksioma | Project Space

Komenskega 18, 1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia

tel.: + 386 - (0)590 54360

gsm: + 386 - (0)41 - 250830

e-mail: marcela at aksioma.org <mailto:marcela at aksioma.org> 

www.aksioma.org <http://www.aksioma.org> 

 

 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://post.in-mind.de/pipermail/spectre/attachments/20200628/7d6f121d/attachment.html>