To face the current economical crisis means to question dualistic perspectives such as capitalism vs anti-capitalism as well as to imagine a sustainable network of values in which accumulation of growth and precarity are substituted by a grassroots ecology of sharing built on an increasing capacity for sociability. This event presents two sets of projects which question the notion of capitalism through direct intervention and collective reflections proposing an exodus from proprietary money and trade regulation through distributed commons and practices of social networking.
 

In Part 1: What Capitalism? Steve Lambert (us) and Daniel Garcia Andujar (es) show how one can critique the concept of capitalism in times of crisis through direct interventions and ludic practices. Elanor Colleoni (it/dk) will act as respondent.

Steve Lambert (USA) – Capitalism Works for ME! True-False
Capitalism Works For Me! True/False is a 6m by 3m sign with an electronic voting display allowing passerby to vote on a deceptively simple question: Does capitalism work for you? Every aspect of the interaction is designed to draw them into more complex questions and conversations. The idea that “there is no alternative” to the way our world works, robs our ability to dream. As citizens we need the courage to begin these discussions so we can move on to new and better visions for our future.

Daniel Garcia Andujar (Spain) / Technologies To The People – Postcapital
Border, Capitalism monolith, Collaboration, Collective Intelligence, Community, Complexity, Connectivity, Constructing History, CopyWhat?, Cultural Memory, Dangerous Knowledge, Decision, Decoding, Digital Diogenes, Digital Revolution, Digitalization, Education, Erratum, Fear, Floating Knowledge, Free software, Global Archive, Information Society, Knowledge Production, Language Cartography, Learn to Learn, Mapping, Mass Media Critic, Memory, Network, Participation, Pathologisation, Post-communism, Private Property, Pro-commons, Public Space, Re-reading, Regression, Simplification, Specific, Topography of Fear, Translation, Transparency, Utopia, Voicing…

In Part 2: Hacking Finance, Rethinking Trade presentations by Jaromil (it/nl), Kate Rich (uk) and Shintaro Miyazaki (jp/de) carve out trade routes across business, art and social interaction, looking beyond financial catastrophes towards a new ecology of money. Elanor Colleoni will continue to be present as respondent.

Kate Rich (uk) - Feral Trade
Feral Trade (import-export) is a grocery business trading outside the savage currents of the open market since 2003. It emerged from an impulse to secure relationships with key commodities using only personal connections. The word ‘feral’ describes a process which is wilfully wild (as in pigeon) as opposed to romantically or nature-wild (wolf).

Jaromil (it/nl) – DYNDY
The website DYNDY is an effort to inform and empower communities with concepts and tools to overcome scarcity, unfolding as an academic research conducted in cooperation with experts from various fields: economists, philosophers and hackers. Its outcomes are visible as publications which, still being grounded in scholarly written theory, aims at divulgation of innovative concepts and at interaction with existing and future implementations of monetary systems. After about two years of research, the findings will be presented in detail.

Shintaro Miyazaki (de/jp) - Algorhythmic Catastrophes 1990-2010.
This presentation describes two case studies: Firstly the breakdown of the AT&T long-distance telephone network in January 1990, which was mentioned in Bruce Sterling’s "Hacker Crackdown", and secondly the recent crash of the US-financial market on 6 May 2010, the “Flash Crash”, due to an over-functioning of algorithmic trading. Algo-Trading is a new kind of trading, which evolved about 2005 and makes now already 70% of the trading activity

(Image: Steve Lambert. Capitalism Works for Me)