Zero Degree Project for Cooling Off Capital — Part 2: Elements for a Cosmo-Financial Proposal

(You can find Part 1 here )

Dear fellow Cooling Off Capital crew,

We converge in imagining a Zero Degree financial ecosystem in which returns on Investment (ROI) would not be measured in the initial fiat/sovereign-based currencies, but rather be expressed in tokens with unique governance capacities. What kind of crypto-economic design and event-based/ community-expressive metrics and social-ecological indexes need to be invented to generate this new alter-financial ecosystem?

Let’s conceive of each economic valuation and measurement as an event in itself and, ultimately, a matter of collective expression. Can we imagine a world in which a myriad of quality-charged currencies meet with one another, each of them carrying the senses and flavours of the community issuing and backing them? The different self-issued tokens interacting within this ecosystem would be a bearer not only of monetized value, but also an index of local expressive forces. These new modes of measuring our collective outputs would catalyse new calibrations between the realm of the quantitative and the realm of the qualitative, providing a unique answer to the proverbial interrogation about what money can and cannot buy.

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“Okay, I like that. But, you know, this system doesn’t look like it would be very efficient.”

“Of course not. Efficiency was just a measurement of how fast money moved from the poor to the rich. We prefer the opposite of efficiency, which is to say, justice.” (Kim Stanley Robinson, Mutt and Jeff Push the Button)

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The question of the sociality of money and the invention of new modes of measurement to establish connection between multi-scalar collectivities is at the heart of what the Zero Degree Initial Ecosystem Offering (IEO) is about. Beyond the design of ever more refined smart contracts, let’s not forget to entertain some generative smart contrasts as a way to enrich our undercommonly living spread!

One transversal issue concerning all of the rafts involved in the IEO is the question of how to measure what economists have traditionally call “intangible assets” (something that corporate accounting as always struggled to account for). In other words: critical here is the issue of measuring social and natural contributions outside the traditional means of the market.

Dick Bryan, Chief Economist at the Economic Space Agency (ECSA) and well known political economist, states the objective clearly in Fundamental Value and Crypto-Economy:

“We want to measure value in terms of social contribution, not contribution to profit. We want to measure produced social benefits of many sorts, and most of them do not make conventionally-defined profits. Recognizing the existence of these contributions is not new. Measuring them in terms of a new crypto-unit of account is new.”

What would a fully qualitative conception of distributed capital compatible with Gabriel Tarde’s pragmatic ideas about mimetic desire and what he calls possessive “social quantities” feel like? Brian Massumi’s thesis on the concept of value here are useful to think capital as the production of a surplus-value of life that at least partly escapes its function as a flat and mono-dimensional computational machine (to draw on fellow econaut Jon Beller’s most recent work). I mention this because part of our work is to reinvent and integrate what’s speculative about capital — its potentiality — instead of simply rejecting it as a toxic and fictitious being like so many commentators on the left readily do. Should we call this challenge: how to save capital from capitalism?

Synthetically put, and in what I would like to call here prospectively a cosmo-financial perspective, the token-based economies to come will express both new modes of abstraction (that is, how we engage in value production and actively envisage futurity) and new modes of attachment (that is the set of historical and site-specific enabling constraints expressing collective matters of concern).

The question of measurement is obviously a very delicate one because measurements happen to be highly performative, that is: they tend to modify the very thing they were meant to harvest at a distance. To paraphrase Donna Haraway’s provocative and staying-with-the-trouble insight: it matters what worlds world worlds; and it matters what measures measure measures.

“Measurements, including practices such as zooming in or examining something with a probe, don’t just happen (in the abstract) they require specific measurement apparatuses. Measurements are agential practices, which are not simply revelatory but performative: they help constitute and are a constitutive part of what is being measured. In other words, measurements are intra-actions (not interactions): the agencies of observation are inseparable from that which is observed. Measurements are world-making: matter and meaning do not preexist, but rather are co-constituted via measurement intra-actions.” (Karen Barad, The measure of Nothingness)

We all know that in the monstrous managerial audit culture neoliberalism has ended up generating, as soon as you try to measure people’s performances, they will switch to optimising for whatever you’re measuring, rather than putting their best efforts into actually doing good work. Tim Harford reminds us that this well-known phenomenon has been given at least three different names:

• Goodhart’s Law: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”
• Campbell’s Law: “The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.”
• The Cobra Effect refers to the way that measures taken to improve a situation can directly make it worse.

Can we measure everything that matters? Can we ever measure anything that matters? How not to prolong the narrow-mindedness of the modes of measurement that have irremediably heaten up capital, the forceful conmensurations that have presided to the flat capitalist imperative of generalized equivalence?

We have chosen to place our collective enterprise under the patronage of Fernand Deligny and his beloved image of the raft. As we follow our wandering lines in our journey through the ruins of capitalism, we glean and we gather and we bundle some con-dividual components into assemblages good enough to float toward new shores. Rafts are by definition precarious and fragile; they also are, for the same reasons, vibrant and necessary, as places of actual inter-holding and virtual thresholding into new modes of common-based existence and production. The fellow rafters we are calling for do not hold too hard on their prefixed common sense of what is possible and what is not; they have, rather, senses for the common to come that might cohere into a collective speculative gesture — let’s risk and speculate together! — if we hold open time and space for it.

Rafts are not so easily “scalable”. In fact, they could even be defined by a sensibility to what, in each assemblage, is abiding to the cautionary principle of non-scalability. Scalability, Anna Tsing tells us, requires that project elements be oblivious to the indeterminacies of encounter. Scalability thus tends to banish meaningful diversity, that is, diversity that might make a difference. Can we be as differential as financial derivatives happen to be in the performative measuring of our successes and failures and the definition of our conditions of felicity?

“The articulation between scalable accounting and nonscalable workplace relations is increasingly accepted as a model for capitalist accumulation. Production does not have to be scalable as long as elites are able to regularize their account books. Can we keep sight of the continuing hegemony of scalability projects while immersing ourselves in the forms and tactics of precarity?” (Anna Tsing, Mushrooms at the end of the World)

What’s valuable must first be defined as vulnerable. In each practice to be measured there insists the interiority of a fold, a minima of belonging, a threshold of territoriality, a differential vulnerability — that is, a soul — that constitutes itself as a practical limit against the destructiveness of generalized equivalence. “All things being equal”: economy’s abstracting war cry needs to be resisted vigorously, as it paves the way for an economic order in which it is normal to sell one’s own workforce.

To create a cosmo-financial ecology of measuring measures and living practices requires to fabulate practitioners who are apt to present themselves on the mode that constitutes their divergent, creative, affirmative force. How does that fare with the promise for blockchain-based frictionless capital and liquidity production more generally, the very ideals that motivate financial innovations in the economy as we know it?

When we decide to ritually open up a shared temporal interval together, that is, when we initiate the process of constituting ourselves as living crypto-derivative in an open-ended post-gift economy, we deliberately bring to the fore the “frictioning” of the singular trajectories that are convening together toward this new qualitatively-charged space. There is a concerted effort in producing a relative “illiquidity” — congealing the “time is money” flat paradigm so that a deeper sense of duration emerges. That’s the very fabric of the heterogeneous encounters we are envisaging (event-based quasi-units of account in the spirit of gift economy) that will lead to a pluralization of values against the realm of generalized equivalence. In this sense, I can’t help but think that, for the time being, the promise of frictionless capital or soulful liquidity should be dealt with carefully.