report

Stacco Troncoso

Interviewed by Inte Gloerich on 19 November 2024

Neoliberalism is a game we did not consent to. Let’s play a different game!

Stacco Troncoso is an avid synthesiser of information and a radical polymath working towards elemental, people-led change on a burning planet. Stacco lives, breathes, teaches, and writes on the commons, P2P politics, and economics, open culture, post-growth futures, platform and open cooperativism, decentralised governance, blockchain, and more. He is a co-founder of DisCO.coop and Guerrilla Translation. See https://disco.coop/ and https://guerrillamedia.coop/. In our conversation, Stacco explains why he believes DAOs feature assumptions and logics that will ultimately reproduce existing power relations. DisCO is a critique of DAOs and proposes its own model for anti-capitalist, decolonial, and intersectionally feminist approaches to work and technology. In our conversation, Stacco explains how commons theory and feminist economics inform the DisCO framework. The example of Guerilla Translation, which is an organisation that applies the framework, highlights the impact DisCO has on people’s lived experience. Finally, Stacco highlights the power of art and playing with the distinction between reality and fiction to convince people that change is needed and possible.

Toward anti-capitalist, decolonial, and intersectionally feminist models

Inte Gloerich Although DisCOs are not DAOs, I would like to ask you the same opening question as I asked the others. How do you explain what DAOs are? Is there anything that you do find interesting about them, and what made you decide to do something different?

Stacco Troncoso I am very ambivalent and critical of DAOs. Many people that use them have very little technical comprehension and yet they have a lot of faith that technology will be able to solve essential social and political matters. At the same time, you have to take into account that the political economy of DAOs is very closely linked to the political economy of Bitcoin, that is, right-wing libertarianism. One of the main ideas that emerges from the intersection of right-wing libertarianism with blockchain technology is that the technology should be used to sanitise away human messiness. People believe that if their smart contracts are detailed and finessed enough, they will be able to prevent any future problems that human messiness causes. This attitude is based on the game theory of neoliberal economists, and it is very deterministic. Instead, my own experience is that the exception is always the rule: something goes wrong every single time. Every equation — however fair it may be in the abstract — does not meet reality exactly.

Additionally, DAOs usually reflect the values of the people that have the money to invest in them or the people that have the technical savviness to design them. The DAO space is saturated with attractive linguistics that persuade people that are not technically savvy to use fiat money to buy tokens. This turns DAOs into investment vehicles rather than vehicles for social innovation. Even though many people involved in DAOs claim that they are reimagining value, this reimagination of value is not very imaginative to me. It reproduces a lot of the same dynamics that are already all around us. They raise money to develop a project, but then after a few years, there is nothing to show for it. If you go back to the websites of some of those early DAO projects now, you will see the same basic promise but with a bit of AI fairy dust on top to catch the latest hype. Well-funded DAOs were promising decentralised, autonomous futures by the mid-2020s. You know the joke about nuclear fusion — it is 20 years in the future and always will be. The promised DAO Utopia is similarly perpetually receding into the horizon. We never seem to arrive at the moment when things are actually working. People first got interested in Ethereum because they wanted to reimagine value and have more autonomy. We are now ten years after the publication of the Ethereum whitepaper, and I think it is fair to say that while it has thrown up some fascinating proposals and use cases, in the larger scheme of things, DAOs have not had the promised and much-hyped impact that gripped so many people’s imaginations.

IG Did DisCO start out from the idea of using a DAO and did you quickly realise that they were not what you were looking for, or did you come across DAOs along the way?

ST Before there was DisCO, there was Guerilla Translation, which is a translation agency that implemented new governance and economic models that consider not just the kind of value that is recognised by the market but also invisible and essential reproductive care work and what we call ‘lovework.’ This lovework consists of voluntary contributions to the commons, such as the pro bono translation of activist material. By putting a value on these different kinds of contributions, we prevent people from stretching themselves beyond their limits by doing what they value most. Being passionate about a cause can often lead to burnout, so we made sure to visibilise those sorts of contributions.

Around the time the Ethereum whitepaper was published in 2014, we were working on an EU project called P2P Value with Primavera di Filippi and Samer Hassan. See e.g., Hassan, Samer. 2014. “Decentralized technologies to support digital commons.” Presentation at P2Pvalue: Collaborative Production Online, Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona, 22 January. https://www.cccb.org/en/multimedia/videos/p2pvalue-decentralized-technologies-to-support-digital-commons/210779. The project researched how common value is created in peer-to-peer and collaborative communities, and we quickly realised that Guerilla Translation would be a great use case to try things out with. Interestingly, the first thing we encountered in this process was a lot of people asking, “Why do you need blockchain technology for this at all?” At first, we thought this was due to a technical misunderstanding, but along the way, we got interested in the significance of this ‘why’ question. We decided to leave behind the practical case of reimagining value with Guerilla Translation and focus on how we could bring its model of value to other domains.

The DisCO Manifesto, Troncoso, Stacco, and Ann Marie Utratel. 2019. If I Only Had A Heart: A DisCO Manifesto. Disco.coop, Transnational Institute, and Guerrilla Media Collective. https://manifesto.disco.coop/. which we published in 2019, was fundamentally a critique of DAOs saying, “Wait a minute, you have gone too fast.” The main problem for us was that, in the DAO space, people seem to have this idea that by developing smart contracts, they are going to solve human messiness. But human messiness is where the fun of life is! If we do not want this planet to turn into a burning hellhole, we need to work together as humans, not as automated scripts. No technology is going to solve climate change if we cannot get our act together as humans.

The DisCO Manifesto embeds these planetary scale issues within a general critique of technology that is very precise in its terminology: we want to see technology that is anti-capitalist, decolonial, and intersectionally feminist. These are very clear words, and for some, they might sound too negative or confrontational. I like to compare it to someone who is allergic to peanuts and therefore really appreciates it when a food label explicitly states that something is free from peanuts and thus will not kill them. Similarly, our planet is fatally allergic to ecological devastation in the name of growth, so stating that something is anti-capitalist is a very useful label indeed. Similarly, if capitalism is based on the labour and resources of formerly colonised countries, then it is important to point this out. And, if capitalism constantly reproduces the patriarchy, then it is important to point this out.

Saying that you are developing something that is anti-capitalist, decolonial, and intersectionally feminist is incredibly liberating, especially in the DAO world. Even though we have to remember that DAOs are different from Bitcoin, these spaces do share a lot of the same exploitative and extractive dynamics.

Take for example feminist economics. Hardly anyone is looking at this in the blockchain space. Maybe since DisCO, there is a bit more awareness, and the Video and descriptions of the panel available at https://www.disco.coop/2019/12/beyond-the-blokechain-the-cryptofeminist-agenda/. Find the programme of the conference and its (video) documentation at https://networkcultures.org/moneylab/events/moneylab-7-outside-of-finance/program/. Beyond the Blokechain: the Cryptofeminist Agenda panel that you organised at the MoneyLab: Outside of Finance conference in 2019 was also an important early contribution. These critiques are fundamental to creating anything truly different from the status quo. The DAO space is filled with revolutionary rhetoric, but if they do not include these kinds of critiques — which they generally do not – then they just end up measuring the same things with new tools. The results will not constitute real change.

IG One of the ways in which the difference between DisCOs and DAOs is described in the Manifesto is by emphasising that DisCOs favour “distributed over decentralised” systems.” Why is this an important distinction to make?

ST Decentralisation is about the connectivity between nodes, but it does not address the economic and tacit power relations between those nodes. Our interpretation is that decentralisation always implies that there is a prior, centralised power structure that you slowly deconstruct to decentralise it. Distribution has a much more direct approach to address power dynamics and hierarchies.

This is so urgent in the context of blockchain technologies. Think for example of the Gini coefficient — which measures various forms of economic inequality — of Bitcoin. It is worse than the coefficient of most fiat currencies. Or think of the levels of non-white, non-male participation in DAOs. They are still staggeringly low. There were a lot of neoliberal feminist projects in DAO culture that organised events promoting women in blockchain, but they did not address the fundamental issues. Their feminism was not anti-capitalist and decolonial. This is not what we need.

Practicing feminist economics

IG How do the ideas of feminist economics take shape in DisCO as a framework or Guerilla Translation specifically?

ST A key part of it is recognising invisible reproductive work, meaning all those efforts that people put in to create optimal conditions for productive work to happen. Feminist economist duo Gibson-Graham uses the metaphor of the iceberg: we only see the productive labour above the surface, but that is only possible because there is a lot of essential work that is hidden below the surface and does not get valued at all. Gibson-Graham, Julie Katherine. 2002. “Diverse Economies: Rethinking the Economy and Economic Representation,” available at http://avery.wellesley.edu/Economics/jmatthaei/transformationcentral/solidarity/solidaritydocuments/diverseeconomies.pdf.

Another important influence in this context is activist anthropologist David Graeber. He went beyond the question of how value gets reproduced towards a more fundamental question. In Marxist theory, you can read about redistributing value to the working class, or nowadays to the precariat. This is important, but Graeber asked the question that should come before the moment of redistribution: he asked what value is in the first place. The economy functions by constantly measuring value, and we have to understand more about the assumptions about value that influence these processes, even while redistributing value back to the working class. Graeber, David. 2002. Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value: The False Coin of Our Own Dreams. London: Palgrave. We have to question why so much work, especially its omnipresent but invisiblised emotional aspects, is still so highly gendered.

Combining these two influences, we started to recognise that, in large companies, care work is both abstracted upwards and pushed downward. In the upward dynamic, there are all these extremely well-paid people in the management layer doing care work; this is what Michael Albert and Robin Hahnel describe as the “Coordinator Class.” See e.g., Albert, Michael. 2003. Parecon: Life after Capitalism. London: Verso. In the downward dynamic, you see that care work — cleaning, maintenance, etc — is highly racialised and gendered. Both of these two dynamics act in service of capital.

Our goal was to move beyond the appreciation of care work in the home — which for example the Wages for Housework movement started to address in the 1970s See e.g., Toupin, Louise. 2018. Wages for Housework: A History of an International Feminist Movement, 1972-77. London: Pluto Press. — towards making visible and valuing care work in the workplace. We tried to apply these insights to our own context with Guerilla Translation. If translation is our productive work, who is doing the housekeeping? Who is taking care of social media? Who is doing the taxes? Who is cleaning the toilets? This is all labour that is needed but does not get paid. We did not want to reproduce either the upward or the downward dynamic of care work and came up with the DisCO model to overcome these limitations. The central idea is very simple: notice how much care work is being done in your organisation and address this in the way you redistribute value. Now, you may decide to tokenise this or timebank it, DisCO is agnostic to the methods you choose, as long as you notice and appreciate care work and have honest conversations about it. If you want to make a DAO, you need to recognise these obscured tendencies and put them in your value proposition. And you need to make the DAO flexible enough to accommodate reality as it changes because that is what messy humanity does.

IG What changed practically for people in Guerilla Translation when they started to organise according to DisCO principles?

ST I will answer this question by talking from my own experience. I was a translator for 20 years before DisCO. I was doing all sorts of translation work while going to protests and reading Kropoktin and other anarcho-communist literature on the side. My day job and my activism were very separate. That is, until Occupy Wall Street happened in 2011. Six months prior, its Spanish predecessor, the 15M movement, See McKeon, Timothy. 2013 “Seeing the Invisible: On Unicorns and the 15-M Movement.” Guerrilla Media Collective. https://www.guerrillamedia.coop/en/seeing-the-invisible-on-unicorns-and-the-15-m-movement/. had taken off, and the people on the streets in New York had a real need to learn from our experiences, but all our documentation was in Spanish. Guerilla Translation emerged to translate relevant pieces of information so that they could be used in different local contexts. For the first time, we organised to put our skills to use for a cause that we agreed with. Soon, it just exploded! We always had more work than we had the capacity for because by voluntarily producing these translations for the commons, people became aware of our skills and came to us with paid jobs that were also intellectually stimulating. Our voluntary work acted as a sort of automatic advertisement! We were reading all these theories but then also putting them into practice.

Creating capacity for the commons

IG In the DisCO Manifesto, you write that it is important to understand the distinction between culture and structure. What does this mean and why is this important?

ST This idea was first verbalised by our mentors David Bollier and Silke Helfrich in their book Free, Fair, and Alive: The Insurgent Power of the Commons. Bollier, David, and Silke Helfrich. 2019. Free, Fair and Alive: The Insurgent Power of the Commons. Gabriola Island, CA: New Society Publishers. https://freefairandalive.org/. They write that within any commons, there is always a tacit relationship between culture and structure. Culture is the animating logic of the group, it is the vibe, it is what you want to do together. Culture also consists of the linguistic codes that you share and the imaginary that you develop together. Structure, on the other hand, consists of all the legal and technological ways in which a culture is made to persist over time. You cannot just sit in a bar and have great conversations about organising your work differently, you also have to define lasting forms to actually put it into practice together with others. Setting up a cooperative is a way to do this using the structures of the legal system. A DAO is a technological way of going about this that is often used by people who do not agree with the way the state distributes value and want to redesign these processes. What you can do with DAOs is still quite limited by regulatory frameworks though; even if you use DAO technology you continuously bump up against the structures of the state.

The key point is that structure cannot survive without culture and vice versa. Culture can just be a nice conversation, and structure is what gives us security about what happens when things go wrong. Beyond legal and technological structures, the commons are another way of creating lasting frameworks. Commons communities have a lot of conversations about trust and fostering collective culture and reinforce this through structures to document and share their practices with others. For example, a coffee cooperative in Colombia can learn from the way another cooperative in Ethiopia stood up to the power of multinationals in order to avoid exploitation. Or they might learn about better ways to grow the coffee plants or how value can be funneled back to the community. These are the kinds of information flows that we want to foster and create frameworks for: DisCO provides a knowledge structure that can be used to design technological and legal structures along anti-capitalist, decolonial, and intersectionally feminist ways. We want to ensure that these transgressive cultures gain legal recognition, validity, and follow-through by creating structures of mutual support.

IG There are a lot of references to the commons in the DisCO materials. There are different theories of the commons. How does DisCO understand the commons?

ST Rather than following Elinor Ostrom, who perhaps is the most famous theorist of the commons, we are much more informed by the work of our mentors David Bollier and Silke Helfrich. Through their work and by learning from our network, we realised that there is a lot of theoretical work on European commons, while the on-the-ground commons work of people in Latin America and Africa still largely remains out of view. Our friend and DisCO team member brandon king, a community organiser in Jackson, Mississippi who co-founded Cooperation Jackson to fight for economic justice, told me once that he “has been with people that can talk about sociocracy and holocracy all day long, but they do not have the empathy to sit with someone and have a conversation.” That so perfectly expresses why we are critical of a large part of the white, academic commons movement and its focus on the enclosure of the English commons while at the same time way more terrible stuff was happening in Africa that no one was talking about.

To be fair, Ostrom also did a lot of work all over Asia, but her focus is too much on the economic dimensions of the commons — which makes sense, she was an economist after all. But for us, the commons are not about economics, they are not about rules. The commons are about social relations. The way I see it, the commons are endemic to human nature. Another thing that Graeber showed was that there are always different economic systems going on at the same time. At school, we all learn about how the arrival of agriculture killed the commons that existed during the hunter-gatherer societies. But this is not true! The commons persisted throughout every different economic model that followed. History is riddled with examples of people drifting away or staying hidden from predatory power structures and, within these, you have commons. Yes, during feudalism a king would forcibly extract an amount of your grain or conscript you for the army, but beneath this extractive layer, peasant economies were largely organised as a commons. Nowadays the commons persists in an untold number of community projects around care, food, free software, or the right to repair. It exists in the 2.5 billion people who derive their sustenance from natural resource commons. It is omnipresent but not legible through the lens of the market.

How much the commons is visible at any given time is the result of power dynamics. To me, the commons is more powerful than the dollar, bitcoin, or petrol. The commons allows us to have autonomy to make decisions about the kind of work we think is valuable to do. I understand the commons as an anti-capitalist, decolonial, and intersectionally feminist way of taking stock of our relationships with each other and with the earth. The commons is invaluable, and we are all already familiar with commons logics, even if Western educational systems — which have been exported globally — teach us to look away from it and instead look to the state or the market for solutions.

IG Over the years, there have been a lot of projects that attempt to protect or produce commons by creating blockchain-based structures. From the way you speak about it, you seem to emphasise instead the cultural dimensions of the commons, is that right?

ST I will not name names, but there are a lot of blockchain projects with ‘commons’ in their name or in their literature that obviously have no clue of what they are talking about. Sometimes they use a cursory reading of Ostrom, or they conflate the commons with public resources, or with “the public,” all while claiming to be anti-statist. Look, the idea of the commons is a lot simpler than any of this, but it does require that you deconstruct your own biases, and that is not easy. The commons are best understood by doing. Only after that, the right kind of structures can be built. The outcomes of many of those blockchain commons projects show that they had a tacit culture of growth and dynamics of accumulation hidden underneath their commons rhetoric, and that is what the rules and protocols will benefit in the end.

IG Capitalism is always ready to coopt anything that attempts to undermine it. How do you protect yourself against this dynamic?

ST By building autonomy and by being clear. For example, with regards to the latter sure, capitalism can coopt the commons, but not when you call what you are doing anti-capitalist. It can be as simple as that.

With regards to the former, you need to identify the tendencies you want to change and create the capacity to do so. Most straightforwardly, capitalism can be defined as a system in which the means of production are privately held, and people must perform wage labour to sustain themselves. This leads to an orientation towards growth and the accumulation of power with the few. When people are hungry, they will do anything, so there is a privilege to this kind of activism. Yet, we must do it so that, when a factory closes down, people realise that they can organise themselves differently. A lot of changes come about when they are not lifestyle choices but survival necessities. In the meantime, rather than selling change as a lifestyle choice, it is better if we focus our attention on creating capacity for the moment when things get worse. We saw this firsthand during the financial crisis of 2008. All around Spain and Greece neighbourhood health clinics and food projects popped up. This was an explosion of the commons!

Defining new terms for new economic systems

IG I came across the term ‘Open Value Cooperativism’ (OVC) in the DisCO manifesto. What does it mean to organise according to this principle?

ST OVC was a big part of the original governance model of DisCO, because we were focused on creating external transparency to allow for mutual coordination between different initiatives. However, we do not use that term so much anymore, now we talk about Open Value Accounting and Radical Distributed Tech. N.d. “DisCO DNA 4: Open Value Accounting and Radical Distributed Tech.” DisCO. https://ball.disco.coop/DisCO_DNA_4:_Open_Value_Accounting_and_Radical_Distributed_Tech. We started to move away from OVC because we realised that what is more important than openness is consent. We decided that within a DisCO-based organisation you have the right to keep your books closed as long as you are practicing a form of value distribution that is consented to by the whole group and is based on a re-examination of what value is in the first place. Each DisCO can decide how open they want to be about their internal data, and they can determine the terms according to which those data can be used. For example, a DisCO may decide to prevent the monetisation of their data, or they can stipulate that their data cannot be fed into machine learning processes.

Another aspect that contributed to our move away from Open Value Cooperativism is the depoliticisation of open source. A lot of the open-source movement got swallowed by big tech, while the people who made it work in the first place were left with the crumbs. Check out Android — the biggest surveillance apparatus in the history of humankind is built on top of our beloved and open-source Linux.

IG Another term I wanted to get some more clarity on is Community Algorithmic Trust.

ST We call it the DisCO CAT! https://basics.disco.coop/8-disco-terminology.html#disco-cat. It builds on the idea of Community Land Trusts, which is a legal structure to host a community’s culture. Imagine a community that wants to prevent a local area from being bought by an investment company that wants to build luxury condos. Instead, they want to build a school and a park to nourish the community. To do this, the community needs to find a way to take the land out of the market. A Community Land Trust allows them to do so and gives them legal protection as well. CLTs can pool money together from their members, or even from their municipality to “lock” the price of land against inflation and speculation.

A CAT is basically the same, but instead of the legal structure, it uses technological structures to recognise care work, emotional labour, and other forms of invisibilised dynamics as forms of value creation that have weight in a system of value redistribution. A CAT can be a spreadsheet, a blockchain, or whatever the community needs it to be. It is important to choose a form that is appropriate for the scale of the community. For example, if you can fit in a room together, you don’t need a blockchain to build trust.

Where is the party at? An update on DisCO

IG What is happening with DisCO currently?

ST We are currently working on an anniversary edition of the Manifesto. Going back to it, we realised that while we were actually right about a lot of things, not everyone will have the time to go through those 80 pages and engage with the enormous amount of links we put in there. So, we are producing several materials to go next to it. For example, we already have a publication called DisCO Elements, Troncoso, Stacco, and Ann Marie Utratel. Groove is in the Heart: DisCO Elements, DisCO, n.d., https://elements.disco.coop/index.html. which is sort of like an outtakes album — we love a good musical reference — next to the Manifesto. DisCO co-founder Ann Marie Utratel is now recording an English audiobook version of the Manifesto and I am recording one in Spanish – which of course was translated by Guerilla Translation!

And now we are writing the DisCO Pink Paper, Stop! In the Name of Love (Before You Break Our Heart): The DisCO Pink Paper, DisCO, forthcoming https://pink.disco.coop/. which starts from this question: what does anti-capitalist, decolonial, intersectionally feminist technology look like? Of course, we cannot answer this question by ourselves, so we have been hosting workshops in which we pose this question to different people and collect their answers. See 2023. “Strategizing with Love, Intentionality, and Presence: DisCO Remastered 2023.” DisCO. https://www.disco.coop/2023/12/strategizing-with-love-intentionality-and-presence-disco-remastered-2023/ for a short film and more information on this approach. We are then using these answers to see how existing technologies could answer people’s needs while needing a minimal amount of investment. We distinguish between three types of “tech we want.” One is already existing and ready to use. Two is existing tech that needs to be adapted or expropriated and brought into the commons, for example, proprietary software that can have social value but is set back by closed code and capitalist mindsets. The third type is the tech we need to create. A clear mapping of all three lets us envision the most expedient combination to improve the efficacy of our systems and practice harm reduction with regard to dangerous tech.

In the future, we want to do more work with communities, and we want to invite people to contribute to the documentation because there is only so much that we know ourselves. Ann-Marie and I are both white and Western, so there is a whole lot that we can’t claim first-hand experience of. People constantly reach out to us with the question if we can teach them to become a DisCO. This never occurred to us, and we do not want to be put on a pedestal as expert consultants or something like that. We want to learn from and with each other, and we are developing programmes and frameworks for that. For example, for anyone interested in becoming a DisCO, we have a questionnaire on the website that helps you think through the DisCO principles and how you want to apply them. https://www.disco.coop/forms/disco-challenge/.

Developing protocols and tools without working with communities just does not work. There is no perfect design that works in all situations. It is way more valuable to work with others to get through hard times together than to work on the next shiny thing that will break down when you need it most.

We have also published a website called DisCO Basics https://basics.disco.coop/. for people who do not have the time to read the whole manifesto. We made it with a system that we are calling qwiki (pronounced as: ‘quickie’), which allows us to put in pop-ups with definitions that people can decide to read or skip according to their interests and needs. This means that we can use technical language without being exclusionary. qwiki is a low-intensity, adaptable technology that does not need a lot of servers to keep it running, so it allows us to extend our principles into these publishing practices as well.

IG Could you share 1 or 2 examples of DisCO-adjacent projects that you think are doing good work?

ST There are a bunch of people who are applying DisCO principles and the language that we developed, such as ‘lovework.’ Reclaiming the language through which we talk about the things that we care about is very important. People have been using neoliberal language for the last 40 years without ever consenting to it and it is really cool to see these more critical words starting to travel around.

There’s a cool group in the UK called Self-Organized Decentralised Accessible Arts (SODAA) https://www.disco.coop/labs/sodaa/. that was doing a DisCO disco, as in discotheque — they are a nightclub run by DisCO principles working toward making nightlife and clubbing a more community-based experience. Then there is Cooperation Jackson, https://cooperationjackson.org/. which is a long-standing institution for creating commons and community resilience. We have had a lot of conversations with them, and we are planning to go there soon to understand their interpretation of the DisCO principles some more. There is a group called the Autonomous Design Group. https://www.weareadg.org/. They have done some great work for DisCO and others and we are working with them on adapting the Guerilla Translation governance model but applying it to design. This works perfectly because a lot of the care work is similar between these two domains.

Right now, we are trying to visit as many of these examples as possible. We want to introduce them to qwiki, so that they can document and share their practices. This should be open to anyone. There are DisCOs out there in the wild that we do not even know about. We do not want to become a regulatory body or anything like that, but we want to learn from these DisCOs! Mutual recognisability is important, so we encourage groups to actively self-identify as a DisCO and use the new economic syntax that comes with it. See https://basics.disco.coop/8-disco-terminology.html. Coops are constantly invisibilised: when we wrote the DisCO Manifesto, globally, cooperatives had a collective turnover of 3.1 trillion USD, which was the same as the market cap of Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and Apple combined. Yet, we never hear about them. Using the right language and narrative is very important to create more visibility.

Faking real change into being

ST We always struggled to define DisCO. We went from thinking about it as an alternative to DAOs to thinking about it as a more politicised form of platform cooperativism. In the end, we have come to the conclusion that DisCO is an artwork. It straddles reality and fiction. We are hypothesising something but then also putting it into practice in the real world. I believe that art is the last chance we have to make this world viable. Everything else failed. Capitalism tells us that it can succeed by using propaganda. Propaganda is art in service of power. We need to reclaim its methods for our own purposes! We are really inspired by a 1973 Orson Welles film called F is for Fake, a documentary about people who create forgeries of Dalí or Picasso paintings, but halfway through, the documentary becomes fake itself. As a viewer, you do not know anymore what is real and what is fiction. Thinking of this film, we started considering DisCO on an artistic level and the power of this intersection of the real and the fake.

Another definition of DisCO is that it is an Economic Live Action Role-Playing game (eLARP). https://ball.disco.coop/DisCO_Glossary#LAERP_(Live_Action_Economic_Role-Playing_Game). We are creating our own rules in the DisCO eLARP, but we are playing with real money. Our art consists of being subversive in the real world and creating real material change for positive social and ecological impacts while being playful at the same time. Neoliberalism was always already a game, although it is one that we did not consent to, with rules that are enforced through dispossession, violence, enclosure, and resource extraction. Let’s play a different game.

IG In the context of DAOs, I always think of it like this: they allow us to do certain things technically, but they also allow us to do things imaginatively. DAOs allow us to speculate together with others while we are also engaging with the dynamics of the real world around us at the same time. These two sides need to be balanced.

ST Yeah, similarly to the balance between culture and structure, there is no imagination without action and vice versa. They are both part of the same process. Being aware that you can have power is very important. The most complicated aspect of overturning capitalism is convincing people that it is possible. We are trying to convince people by giving them solutions to their practical needs, by inspiring them through art, and by giving them hope. Together, we can change the narrative of reality.

IG Finally, I am just wondering, what is with all the references to music and dancing?

ST Well, we come from punk. We want to make music, but we find ourselves in this subculture around political economy, P2P, and the commons. When we realised that we did not want to make DAOs, but rather DIStributed COoperatives, Ann Marie came up with the name DisCO. That was an immediate hit! An added layer of meaning is that as a musical genre, disco is tied to black and queer movements in the 1970s. See Polyphonic. 2022. “The Untold History of Disco.” YouTube video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_c2dCO5WLo. At the same time, our visuals are a reference to punk, graffiti, and street art culture. All these references communicate different elements of what we want to do with DisCO. Additionally, the name has a punk sort of power: it is easy to remember and you can write it on the doors of toilets.

Good visuals, good narrative, good concept, they all help so much with getting things done. They are like chocolate; they go straight to the pleasure centres of the brain. This is why art is the most powerful thing in the world.